AVP: Principal Engineer (DSG Scale)

Overview:

Houlihan Lokey, Inc. (NYSE:HLI) is a leading global investment bank recognized for delivering independent strategic and financial advice to corporations, financial sponsors, and governments. With uniquely deep industry expertise, broad international reach, and a partnership approach rooted in trust, the firm provides innovative, integrated solutions across mergers and acquisitions, capital solutions, financial restructuring, and financial and valuation advisory. Our unmatched transaction volumes provide differentiated, data-driven perspectives that help our clients achieve their most critical goals. To learn more about Houlihan Lokey, please visit HL.com.

Scope:

We are seeking a highly accomplished Principal Engineer to serve as the technical authority and architectural leader for our cloud-native platform and infrastructure within the Financial Platform organization. In this role, you will define the platform architecture roadmap, design mission-critical infrastructure patterns, and lead the technical execution of platforms that power large-scale, distributed financial applications.

Key Responsibilities:

• Platform Architecture & Strategic Direction: Define and drive the target-state architecture for our next-generation, cloud-native platform (Kubernetes, multi-region cloud topologies, and AI/workload enablement). Translate overarching business goals into scalable, resilient, and decoupled platform capabilities.
• Modern Web & End-to-End Automation with Playwright: Standardize and implement Playwright for modern browser and web application automation, utilizing browser context isolation, parallel test execution, request interception, and resilient auto-waiting mechanisms for frontend platform portals.
• Automated Regression, Integrated & Functional Testing: Architect and drive automated testing frameworks across the platform lifecycle, establishing continuous automated regression suites across CI/CD environments, multi-service integrated testing across distributed microservices and event brokers, and end-to-end functional automated tests validating complex financial workflows and edge cases.
• Hands-On Core Engineering: Lead by example by writing production-grade code, building foundational custom tooling/operators (Typescript, Python), authoring reusable Terraform modules, and designing reference implementations for engineering teams.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Serve as a mentor and technical coach to junior and mid-level engineers. Facilitate design reviews, establish architecture RFC processes, conduct deep code/infrastructure reviews, and foster a strong culture of engineering excellence.
• Enterprise CI/CD & Developer Experience (DevEx): Architect automated, self-service golden paths and progressive delivery pipelines (canary, blue-green) that minimize cognitive load for application developers while ensuring strict deployment guardrails.
• Observability, SRE & Chaos Engineering: Design holistic telemetry strategies utilizing OpenTelemetry. Define enterprise SLI/SLO standards, error budget policies, resilience testing/chaos engineering, and lead complex root-cause analyses (RCA) for critical production incidents.

Basic Qualifications:

• Experience: 7+ years of hands-on experience in Platform Engineering, QA Automation, SRE, Distributed Systems, or Cloud Architecture, with a proven track record of designing and operating large-scale, production-grade distributed systems.
• Architecture & System Design: Demonstrated expertise in architecting complex, highly available, fault-tolerant, and secure cloud topologies (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Automated Test Engineering Mastery: Demonstrated proficiency in architecting automated regression, integration, and functional test frameworks; extensive hands-on experience with Playwright for web/UI testing and modern API testing tools.
• Security, Auth & Impersonation Validation: Hands-on experience testing and validating authentication/authorization modules (OAuth2, OIDC, JWT), RBAC access matrices, and user impersonation security logic.
• Infrastructure-as-Code Mastery: Mid-level proficiency with Terraform (custom provider/module development, state locking, drift detection) and Policy-as-Code engines (e.g., OPA, Rego, Kyverno).
• Mentorship & Influence: Proven track record of guiding junior engineers, driving engineering consensus across disparate teams, and leading technical initiatives without direct authority.
• Observability & Reliability: Hands-on experience with modern observability platforms, distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana ecosystems, and enterprise SRE practices.
• Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience architecting platforms within highly regulated domains (e.g., Financial Services, FinTech, Banking).
• Deep experience with Securing Cloud Native Platform.
• Experience designing, building, or operating large-scale Data Platforms is highly desirable.
• Active contributions to open-source cloud-native projects (CNCF ecosystem).

We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.