Job Description
Ally and Your Career Ally Financial only succeeds when its people do - and that’s more than some cliché people put on job postings. We live this stuff! We see our people as, well, people - with interests, families, friends, dreams, and causes that are all important to them. Our focus is on the health and safety of our teammates as well as work-life balance and diversity and inclusion. From generous benefits to a variety of employee resource groups, we strive to build paths that encourage employees to stretch themselves professionally. We want to help you grow, develop, and learn new things. You’re constantly evolving, so shouldn’t your opportunities be, too? Work Schedule: Ally designates roles as (1) fully on-site, (2) hybrid, or (3) fully remote. Hybrid roles are generally expected to be in the office a certain number of days per week as indicated by your manager. Your hiring manager will discuss this role's specific work requirements with you during the hiring process. All work requirements are subject to change at any time based on leader discretion and/or business need. The Opportunity We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to serve as a technical authority for Ally’s API Core Engineering division. You will lead the design, development, and evolution of our API platform, frameworks, and tooling that power enterprise-scale services. You’ll partner closely with platform, security, SRE, and application teams to drive adoption, reliability, and developer productivity across the SDLC. The Work Itself Act as a technical authority across design, coding, testing, debugging, deployment, and support for the API platform and developer tooling. Own the platform roadmap for API Core Engineering in partnership with product and platform leadership; drive architectural decisions and standards. Design and implement applications, frameworks, CLIs, and libraries that improve developer productivity, reliability, and SDLC efficiency. Build and maintain platform services and components in Node.js (TypeScript/JavaScript); contribute high-quality, testable, and observable code. Develop comprehensive automated tests using Node.js testing frameworks (e.g., Jest, Mocha, Chai) and enforce testing best practices. Design and enhance CI/CD pipelines, tooling, and templates using GitLab CI, Python, and shell scripting; champion release automation and quality gates. Lead upgrades, operational support, and incident response for the API platform; drive root cause analysis and long-term resiliency improvements. Architect and deliver solutions on public cloud (AWS preferred), leveraging Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and modern DevOps practices. Define and evolve standards for API and microservices (REST, security, observability, performance, documentation). Partner with enterprise development teams to accelerate adoption of the API gateway and internal frameworks; provide guidance, patterns, and enablement. Mentor engineers, perform design/PR reviews, and cultivate engineering excellence and platform thinking. Skills The Skills You Bring Minimum Qualifications 7+ years of relevant experience Bachelor’s Degree in relevant field(s) of study or equivalent Preferred Qualifications 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep expertise in Node.js and TypeScript/JavaScript. 2+ years in senior or principal roles. Proficiency in Python and scripting (Bash/Zsh) for tooling, automation, and CI/CD integration. Strong experience with automated testing in Node.js (Jest, Mocha, Chai or equivalent) and a quality-first mindset. Hands-on experience building and operating services on public cloud (AWS strongly preferred). Experience designing and developing APIs or microservices (REST), including versioning, authentication/authorization, and documentation. Proven experience with DevOps toolchains: GitLab (CI/CD), Terraform (IaC), and Git-based workflows. Strong understanding of software architecture, reliability, performance, and observability (logging, metrics, tracing). Strategic thinker with hands-on problem-solving skills. Nice-to-Haves: Experience with API Gateways (e.g., Kong, Apigee, AWS API Gateway, NGINX) including policies, plugins, and operational support. Background working with or within Platform/Enablement teams; experience driving enterprise-wide tooling adoption. AWS certifications and/or deep AWS service knowledge (ECS/EKS/Lambda, API Gateway, IAM, CloudWatch, CloudFormation/Terraform). Familiarity with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), and secr