Principal IT Engineer (m/f/d)

The Principal IT Engineer (m/f/d) leads the design, development, deployment, and management of the organization's IT application landscape. This role is pivotal in delivering technological engineering and operational excellence across all stages of the software development lifecycle. You will provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineering and infrastructure teams, oversee vendor relationships, and foster a collaborative, high-performing engineering culture.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the technical architecture and engineering standards for enterprise applications, ensuring alignment with organizational goals, scalability, and security requirements
• Design and implement complex, distributed systems and integration patterns across the application landscape
• Drive technical design decisions across transformation initiatives and ensure production-grade implementation quality
• Provide technical leadership and guidance to engineering teams through hands-on involvement, code reviews, and architectural guidance
• Mentor engineers at all levels, fostering technical growth and best practices adoption
• Lead technical decision-making processes and establish engineering standards across teams
• Drive adoption of modern engineering practices including CI/CD, automated testing, code quality metrics, and DevSecOps principles
• Oversee end-to-end software development lifecycle from requirements analysis through deployment and maintenance
• Champion engineering metrics and KPIs to drive data-informed improvements in software delivery and operations
• Drive incident response, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement in system reliability
• Collaborate with Product Owners to translate business requirements into robust, scalable technical solutions

Key Requirements

• Advanced degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or related field
• 7+ years of experience in engineering roles, with 2+ years leading small engineering/infrastructure teams
• Full stack coding background (e.g., Python, ReactJS, SQL) with experience overseeing full lifecycle development, from solution design to production support
• Extensive knowledge of enterprise architecture patterns, distributed systems, and cloud-native design principles
• Track record of successfully delivering complex, multi-team software initiatives
• Proficiency in Azure infrastructure components including networking, compute (AppService, Azure Functions), storage (ADLS2, Azure SQL DB, Databricks), identity & access management (Entra ID, MIs, RBAC), security, cost optimization
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), environment provisioning, configuration management, and secrets management
• Proven track record setting up and optimizing CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions), automated testing, release management, observability, and monitoring for reliable deployments
• Experience establishing and scaling engineering practices across multiple teams
• Demonstrated success in managing vendor ecosystems and driving accountability, especially across vendor engineering teams
• Demonstrated ability to balance hands-on technical work with strategic planning
• Strong stakeholder management skills paired with an agile and adaptive approach
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a focus on quality and efficiency
• Comfortable translating business needs into scalable, sustainable engineering solutions

Preferred Qualifications

• Data engineering knowledge including familiarity with data modeling and governance frameworks (e.g., medallion architecture, Data Vault 2.0, MDM)
• Experience with data engineering platforms (Databricks, Delta Lake) and modern data architecture
• Experience working in real estate, financial services, or investment management environments
• Experience integrating third-party enterprise systems common in real estate (SAP, Yardi, MRI, Salesforce)
• Prior experience managing multi-vendor delivery and shoring  models
• Multilingual capabilities (German, French) for global team collaboration
• Experience with agile methodologies and engineering productivity metrics
• Knowledge of regulatory standards relevant to the industry (SOX, GDPR, etc.)
• Demonstrated ability to "roll up sleeves" for hands-on debugging, code reviews, and technical problem-solving

Benefits

• Onboarding: A mentor, a buddy program and a global welcome event will help you getting started.
• Learning: A large portfolio of continuous learning opportunities will help you staying relevant in your current role and growing into future workplace demands.
• Working place: An open and international working environment with a diverse and inclusive culture will inspire your everyday work. A working model which balances remote and office based work will give you the flexibility to organize the way you work.
• Benefits: A company pension scheme, well-being initiatives, sports offers and other local benefits will allow you achieving a positive work life balance.

A leading global real estate investor and manager, PIMCO Prime Real Estate is a PIMCO company and part of the PIMCO real estate platform, focusing on the Core and Core+ segments of the market and managing the Allianz Group’s $85B real estate mandate. We manage a global investment portfolio c. $90B AUM, with an international team of c. 450 employees working in 16 offices in Belgium, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the U.S. PIMCO’s real estate platform is one of the largest and most diversified in the world, with $174B in assets and a broad set of solutions that leverage decades of expertise across public and private equity and debt markets.

Allianz Group is one of the most trusted insurance and asset management companies in the world. Caring for our employees, their ambitions, dreams and challenges, is what makes us a unique employer. Together we can build an environment where everyone feels empowered and has the confidence to explore, to grow and to shape a better future for our customers and the world around us. 
We at Allianz believe in a diverse and inclusive workforce and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We encourage you to bring your whole self to work, no matter where you are from, what you look like, who you love or what you believe in.
We therefore welcome applications regardless of ethnicity or cultural background, age, gender, nationality, religion, disability or sexual orientation.
Great to have you on board. Let's care for tomorrow.