Role Summary
The Lead Software Engineer serves as the organization’s most senior hands-on technical leader, responsible for addressing the firm’s most complex engineering challenges across critical, highly integrated platforms. Operating at an architectural level, this role drives system-wide quality, resiliency, and modernization, eliminating high-risk technical blockers that are beyond the scope of less senior engineers. The Lead is accountable for setting technical direction, ensuring execution quality, and maintaining architectural integrity across multiple interconnected systems, playing a key role in advancing modernization, resiliency, and AWS cloud strategies.

Responsibilities

• Owns end-to-end technical outcomes across multiple platforms and services.
• Establishes architecture standards, resiliency patterns, and operational guardrails.
• Serves as the final escalation point for production issues spanning applications, infrastructure, and integrations.
• Influences modernization roadmaps, platform evolution, and cross-team engineering practices.
• Lead the design and implementation of complex, distributed systems with significant organizational impact.
• Make architectural decisions across multiple platforms and services, often with incomplete information.
• Resolve deep technical challenges spanning workflows, runtime behavior, data consistency, and cross-system dependencies.
• Define and enforce patterns for reliability, scalability, security, and cost efficiency, aligned with AWS Well-Architected principles.

Qualifications

Required:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent experience and 8+ years of progressive professional experience

Core Technology Stack and Expertise:

• Deep experience with AWS cloud services.
• Skilled in managing compute resources (EC2, Auto Scaling, Lambda, ECS/EKS), advanced storage solutions (S3 with lifecycle management and versioning, EBS, EFS), and resilient data durability strategies.
• Proficient in AWS networking: VPC design, subnets, routing, gateways, security controls, Route 53 DNS, and CloudFront.

Resiliency and Reliability Engineering:

• Expertise in multi-AZ architectures, health checks, ALB/NLB, and Route 53 failover.
• Experienced with disaster recovery strategies (backup/restore, pilot light, warm standby, active-active) across AWS regions.
• Builds resilient applications using idempotency, retries, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation.
• Ensures data resilience (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB global tables, cross-region replication); familiarity with chaos testing and AWS Well-Architected best practices.

Security:

• Proficient in AWS security: IAM (roles, policies, least privilege), AWS Organizations and SCPs.
• Skilled in encryption and secrets management (KMS, ACM, Secrets Manager, Parameter Store).
• Experienced with governance and detection tools (CloudTrail, Config, GuardDuty, Security Hub, WAF, Shield); designs secure networks with VPC endpoints, PrivateLink, Security Groups, Network ACLs.
• HashiCorp Vault experience is a plus.

Infrastructure as Code and DevOps:

• Skilled with Terraform, AWS CDK, and CloudFormation for Infrastructure as Code; modular design and CI/CD pipeline management (GitLab CI).
• Proficient with Docker, EKS/ECS, and serverless architectures.

Observability:

• Competent with CloudWatch logging, metrics, and alarms; distributed tracing with X-Ray and OpenTelemetry.
• Implements centralized logging, SLOs, error budgets, and develops runbooks and post-incident reviews.

Languages and Frameworks:

• Highly proficient in Java or Python for production services.
  • Java: Spring Boot, Gradle, JVM tuning.
  • Python: FastAPI, dependency management (poetry/uv), virtual environments.
• Skilled in RESTful API design, automated unit and integration testing, and upholding quality standards through linters, formatters, and secure coding practices.

Execution Leadership:

• Remove high-risk technical blockers affecting delivery and quality (dependencies, security, performance, observability).
• Accelerate iteration through improved CI/CD, test strategies, and code quality standards.
• Lead through hands-on activities: pair programming, code reviews, design sessions, and production debugging.

Technical Authority & Strategy:

• Act as the technical authority within Infrastructure Engineering and partner teams.
• Shape business unit technical strategy, including modernization, container/serverless adoption, and platform consolidation.
• Guide decisions on upgrades, deprecations, and migration paths to AWS target architectures.

Mentorship & Capability Building:

• Mentor engineers at various seniority levels to raise system design, debugging, and operational maturity.
• Model best practices in design reviews, failure mode analysis, and performance tuning.
• Create repeatable patterns, runbooks, and reference architectures to enable teams to manage increasing complexity.

Preferred:

• Experience in financial services or other highly regulated industries preferred
• Advanced degree or relevant certifications

FINRA Requirements

FINRA licenses are not required and will not be supported for this role.

Work Flexibility

This role is eligible for hybrid work, with up to three days per week from home.

Base Salary Ranges

Please review the job posting for the location of this specific opportunity.

$122,000.00 - $209,000.00 for the location of: Maryland, Colorado, Washington and remote workers
$135,000.00 - $230,000.00 for the location of: Washington, D.C.
$153,000.00 - $261,000.00 for the location of: New York, California

Placement within the range provided above is based on the individual’s relevant experience and skills for the role. Base salary is only one component of our total compensation package. Employees may be eligible for a discretionary bonus, which is determined upon company and individual performance.

Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

At T. Rowe Price, our associates are our greatest asset. We thrive because our company culture is built on inclusion and because we sustain a work environment where associates can bring their best selves to work every day. The backgrounds, talents, and experiences of our global associates allow us to embrace new ideas and perspectives that move our business priorities forward and enable us to deliver strong client outcomes. Here, you can expect equal opportunity and fair and consistent treatment for all.

Benefits

T. Rowe Price is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity of thought, gender, and race. We believe our continued success depends upon the equal treatment of all associates and applicants for employment without discrimination on the basis of race, religion, creed, color, national origin, sex, gender, age, mental or physical disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, citizenship status, military or veteran status, pregnancy, or any other classification protected by country, federal, state, or local law.