Lead Innovation Software Engineer

About this role

Make banking a Fifth Third better®
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General Function:
The Lead Innovation Software Engineer partners across Technology, Product, Strategy, and line-of-business teams to help define and demonstrate the future of Fifth Third Bank’s products, services, and enterprise architecture. This is a hands-on innovation role for a builder, strategist, and collaborator who can connect human-centered design with strong technical depth. The person in this role helps teams evaluate and apply emerging technologies, modern engineering practices, and new ways of working to accelerate product innovation and improve delivery. They may lead a major initiative or several smaller efforts while influencing stakeholders and development teams toward modern, practical solutions.
This role offers the opportunity to work closely with production squads on meaningful, high-priority initiatives while gaining a deep understanding of the bank’s technology stack, products, and delivery environment. By pairing strategic thinking with real-world execution, the Lead Innovation Software Engineer helps turn ideas into practical demonstrations, prototypes, and capability visions that can influence enterprise direction.
We are looking for someone with strong curiosity, a forward-looking mindset, and a passion for staying current on emerging technology and fintech trends. The Lead Innovation Software Engineer should be an active user of artificial intelligence and a thoughtful advocate for responsible adoption. This person brings creativity, analytical thinking, and strong communication to the role, using data, prototypes, and other tangible artifacts to explore ideas, improve processes, and help others understand what is possible and how we might achieve it.
The Lead Innovation Software Engineer will be responsible and accountable for risk by openly exchanging ideas and opinions, elevating concerns, and personally following policies and procedures as defined. This position acts as the liaison between the Risk, Audit and Analytic teams. Accountable for always doing the right thing for customers and colleagues and ensures that actions and behaviors drive a positive customer experience. While operating within the Bank's risk appetite, achieves results by consistently identifying, assessing, managing, monitoring, and reporting risks of all types.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Develop a strong understanding of Fifth Third Bank’s current and future-state technology and product architecture

• Help shape the bank’s evolution as a product-led enterprise built on a modern technology foundation

• Identify and prioritize opportunities to expand enterprise technology capabilities in support of customer and product innovation

• Partner with engineers, architects, and line-of-business leaders to envision, demonstrate, and develop new or improved financial products, business processes, and technology-enabled capabilities

• Lead end-to-end data workflows including extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) from structured and unstructured sources; perform quantitative and qualitative analysis; and develop interactive dashboards and visualizations (e.g., Power BI) to support decision-making, stakeholder reporting, and product insights.

• Identify, evaluate, and benchmark fintechs and emerging startups by analyzing their technology architecture, product capabilities, business models, and financial viability; synthesize findings into comparative assessments and strategic recommendations aligned to enterprise priorities and market relevance.

• Influence enterprise thinking on the future of technology across innovation, software development, fintech, artificial intelligence, and digital assets

• Lead or contribute to research and evaluation of emerging design, technology, industry, and market trends

• Translate customer needs, competitor activity, industry shifts, and technology developments into actionable insights

• Provide technical leadership, guidance, and mentorship to team members and partners

• Recognize meaningful patterns across industry, technology, and cultural change and explain their business impact

• Use systems thinking to connect ideas across products, platforms, teams, and enterprise capabilities

• Design solutions with the broader business and technology ecosystem in mind

• Apply structured problem solving and root cause analysis to address challenges and uncover new opportunities

• Recommend technology options and design approaches to senior leaders and key stakeholders

• Create compelling narratives, demonstrations, prototypes, and communications that bring concepts to life

• Share lessons learned, best practices, and new ideas across the team and broader organization

Supervisory Responsibilities: None.
Knowledge, Skills & Ability Required:

• Bachelor’s degree in a STEM field or equivalent combination of education and relevant experience

• 5+ years of experience in roles closely aligned to the responsibilities of this position

• Strong front-end development experience delivering commercial solutions using modern web standards and frameworks such as HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, Angular, React, Vue, or similar tools

• Strong back-end development experience working with APIs, services, event-driven architectures using Kafka, databases, SQL, and modern data platforms such as Snowflake, with a clear understanding of how front-end frameworks integrate with back-end systems

• Deep experience with at least one server-side language such as Python, Java, Node.js, or PHP

• Infrastructure experience building, configuring, and supporting scalable web applications in cloud or hosted environments such as AWS or Azure

• Experience with modern server-side tooling, deployment practices, and hosting models

• Experience working in a mature DevOps environment using version control,…