Principal Engineer

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy for the pillar, guiding multiple squads towards high-quality, scalable and well-architected solutions.
• Lead the design and development of complex, high-scale systems.
• This means writing real code, building proofs of concept and diving into problem-solving.
• Ensure teams within the initiative follow engineering best practices, write clean and maintainable code, and maintain high standards in security, performance and observability.
• Support and upskill Lead Engineers and squad engineers, helping them grow into their full potential.
• Champion SOLID principles, automated testing and CI/CD best practices, ensuring deployments are fast, safe and seamless.
• Help teams build highly observable systems using DataDog and other tools, making sure we can see and fix issues before they impact users.
• Work closely with Product Managers, Senior Product Directors, Delivery Managers and Engineering Managers to ensure our technical approach aligns with business needs.
• Be comfortable working with GitHub Actions, Terraform, Kubernetes and AWS to ensure our systems are resilient and scalable.

Requirements

• Proven experience designing large, distributed, data-driven systems in the cloud, and of running an engineering team or squad previously.

Job Description

The Role As a Principal Engineer, you'll be leading the technical direction of a core pillar in our Engineering department: APIs. You'll set the architectural vision, make high-impact technical decisions, and guide multiple squads towards building scalable, well-engineered software within our API ecosystem. This is a hands-on role, where you'll be designing, coding and solving the toughest technical challenges. With a modern cloud-native stack and the freedom to approach problems with fresh thinking, you'll be working at the cutting edge, embedding AI, automation and best-in-class engineering practices into everything we build. Our platform is primarily event-driven, so Kafka knowledge is critical, and we heavily leverage Salesforce as a key service, so enterprise knowledge of Salesforce or other CRMs is a big plus. Finally, our APIs are both synchronous and asynchronous, using both REST and GraphQL.

AI & Future Tech

Push the boundaries of AI-driven development, with the space to explore ideas on how to embed AI into our engineering processes. Knowledge, Skills and Behaviours Essential Tech stack: Comfortable with TypeScript (Node.js and React), AWS (EKS, Lambda, Aurora RDS), Kubernetes and GraphQL, with extensive knowledge of JavaScript more generally, the AWS ecosystem and running containerised applications.

Test-Driven Development

Very familiar with testing frameworks such as Jest and Pact.

Architecture & Problem Solving

Able to architect a system that scales, handles high throughput and integrates seamlessly with a complex ecosystem.

CI/CD & Infrastructure as Code

Experience deploying production systems using Terraform and Helm, and experience with GitHub Actions as a CI/CD platform.

Observability Mindset

Believes in measuring everything, and has worked with DataDog (or similar) to ensure teams have visibility into system health.

Software Craftsmanship

Writes high-quality, maintainable code, champions SOLID principles, and understands when to be pragmatic versus when to be purist.

Mentorship & Leadership

Experience mentoring engineers at all levels, providing guidance, reviewing designs and ensuring teams stay on the right track.

Reward & Benefits

What's in it for me? We want our people to feel recognised, supported and able to thrive both at work and beyond it. We offer a competitive reward package designed to support your financial, physical and mental wellbeing, alongside opportunities to learn, develop and be recognised for the contribution you make. Benefits vary by role and location, and full details will be shared as part of the application process.

Equal opportunities

Our commitment to inclusion Collinson Group is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, identities and experiences, and believe that different perspectives make our business stronger.