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.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership: Own the technical strategy for the pillar, guiding multiple squads towards high-quality, scalable and well-architected solutions.
Hands-On Architecture & Development: Lead the design and development of complex, high-scale systems. This means writing real code, building proofs of concept and diving into problem-solving.
Engineering Consistency: Ensure teams within the initiative follow engineering best practices, write clean and maintainable code, and maintain high standards in security, performance and observability.
Mentorship & Coaching: Support and upskill Lead Engineers and squad engineers, helping them grow into their full potential.
Modern Software Practices: Champion SOLID principles, automated testing and CI/CD best practices, ensuring deployments are fast, safe and seamless.
Observability & Performance: Help teams build highly observable systems using DataDog and other tools, making sure we can see and fix issues before they impact users.
Collaboration: Work closely with Product Managers, Senior Product Directors, Delivery Managers and Engineering Managers to ensure our technical approach aligns with business needs.
Infrastructure & Deployment: Be comfortable working with GitHub Actions, Terraform, Kubernetes and AWS to ensure our systems are resilient and scalable.
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.
Past Experience: Proven experience designing large, distributed, data-driven systems in the cloud, and of running an engineering team or squad previously.
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…