Collin
Kueter
Senior Software Engineer
AI Focused Solutions Architect
Senior Software Engineer with more than ten years of experience across fintech, healthcare, and consumer mobile. Builds modular Claude Skills with Claude Code. Currently a Solutions Architect at Principal Financial Group, where custom Claude Skills replaced six-figure vendor tools, and founder of Collality LLC shipping mobile products to thousands of users.
Work Experience
Principal Financial Group Oct 2025 – Present
Senior Software Engineer II · Solutions Architect
Solutions architect leading the modernization of Principal's retirement-billing platform from a COBOL/mainframe monolith to a cloud-native AWS architecture. 20% allocated to the business unit AI Enablement team.
- Lead the architectural design for modernizing the retirement-billing platform, which serves tens of thousands of plan contracts. The target architecture migrates the platform from a COBOL/mainframe monolith to cloud-native AWS, with strategic vendor integration filling capability gaps.
- Facilitate Event Storming sessions with engineering, product, and operations stakeholders to map the legacy billing domain into bounded contexts and clarify system ownership.
- Built a Claude Skill trained on Principal's COBOL codebase that, per the company's lead COBOL experts, outperformed vendor tools costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Composed it with custom DB2 and source-code analysis Skills to cut a three-month Senior Engineer impact-analysis effort on the retirement-billing modernization to under an hour.
- Authored the Vendor Decision Record (VDR) process being adopted company-wide to standardize vendor selections across Principal.
- Authored and presented CRAFT (Conceptualize, Refine, Architect, Fabricate, Test), a structured agentic development pattern, during a company-wide demo.
Axoni May 2022 – Aug 2025
Senior Software Engineer
Distributed ledger and real-time data replication platform for global financial institutions. Worked on the flagship HYDRA product.
- Led core architectural decisions for HYDRA, Axoni's data-integrity platform, built on Typelevel Scala, gRPC, Kafka, and PostgreSQL. The system delivered a 500% performance improvement over the previous blockchain implementation and enabled $20M+ in new contracts.
- Led a team of 4 engineers through the full lifecycle of HYDRA's real-time validation and cryptographic replication components, holding a bar of byte-for-byte data accuracy at speeds the previous blockchain implementation could not match.
- Owned technical relationships with major clients and led complex on-site and remote integrations for their post-trade workflow systems.
- Served as Axoni's technical lead during the company's partial acquisition, conducting buyer demonstrations and leading the technical due diligence.
- Restructured Axoni's Agile practice (refinement, planning, retrospectives) and reduced meeting overhead by 75% while maintaining delivery predictability.
- Founded internal Scala study groups and functional-programming sessions that shaped hiring decisions and engineering practices over multiple years.