Principal Software Engineer

It's fun to work in a company where people truly BELIEVE in what they're doing!
Job Description Summary:
It's fun to work in a company where people truly BELIEVE in what they're doing!

Rocket Software is seeking an accomplished Principal Software Engineer – Change Data Capture & Data Integration to help drive the evolution of our Enterprise Data Integration portfolio.
This is a deeply technical, hands-on role focused on the design, implementation, and optimization of Change Data Capture (CDC) technologies across mainframe and distributed environments. The successful candidate will develop software that captures and processes transactional changes from enterprise databases, requiring expertise in database internals, transaction-log processing, systems programming, and high-volume data processing.
The ideal candidate thrives in complex environments, rapidly understands mature legacy systems, reverse engineers undocumented formats and behaviors, and develops highly reliable software that operates at enterprise scale. This role combines technical leadership with a strong sense of ownership and accountability for customer success.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities :

- Architect, design, and implement Change Data Capture and data integration technologies.

- Develop software that reads, interprets, and processes database transaction logs.

- Analyze database internals, transaction structures, encodings, and storage formats.

- Reverse engineer undocumented or partially documented software, interfaces, and data structures.

- Build, compile, debug, and test software across both mainframe and distributed environments.

- Diagnose complex performance, reliability, compatibility, and data-integrity issues.

- Drive technical direction for CDC-related capabilities and engineering standards.

- Mentor engineers and share expertise in systems programming, database technologies, and software architecture.

- Collaborate with Product Management, Support, and Customer Success teams to solve complex customer challenges.

- Participate in the investigation and resolution of critical customer escalations involving business-critical production environments.

- Demonstrate flexibility to work outside normal business hours when required to support critical customer issues, production incidents, releases, or operational events.

- Champion innovation and adoption of modern engineering and AI-assisted development practices.

Required Qualifications:

- 10+ years of software engineering experience.

- Strong proficiency in C, C++, or comparable systems programming languages.

- Experience developing enterprise-scale software involving database internals, data replication, CDC, transaction processing, or similar technologies.

- Proven ability to understand and work within large, mature legacy codebases.

- Experience reverse engineering software behavior, transaction logs, binary formats, encodings, or proprietary interfaces.

- Hands-on experience building, compiling, debugging, and testing software across mainframe and distributed platforms.

- Strong understanding of performance optimization, concurrency, reliability, and data integrity.

- Excellent analytical, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills.

- Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

- Expertise in one or more of the following: Db2 for z/OS, Db2 LUW, Datacom, Adabas, or IDMS.

- Experience with CDC, replication, recovery, log-reading, or database utility technologies.

- Familiarity with z/OS, JCL, EBCDIC, packed decimal, and related mainframe technologies.

- Experience modernizing mature enterprise software systems.

- Experience with cloud-based or distributed architectures.

Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, IS, or related technical discipline.
Travel Requirements:

Information Security:

Information security is everyone’s responsibility. A fundamental principle of information security at Rocket Soft