Principal Engineer

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 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.