Principal Developer

Group Technology

Principal Developer

Full-time · Stockport office every Thursday; remote the rest of the week · Salary dependent on experience

About Naturecan

Naturecan Group is a fast-growing, multi-entity health and wellness business operating across e-commerce, regulated pharmacy, and clinical healthcare. We run operations across the UK, Germany, and beyond - brands include Naturecan (D2C, ~50 Shopify stores), Mycannabis and Nowomed (German medical cannabis pharmacy), WMG Pharma (wholesale pharmaceutical distribution), and Dose (our CQC-registered UK medical cannabis clinic, in development).

Group net sales continue to group across Naturecan Core, MedCan pharmacy, WMG wholesale, and Dose all scaling simultaneously. The technology team sits at the heart of that growth: we build and maintain the platforms that underpin every entity in the group.

The Role

This is a group-level principal technical role. You will report directly to the IT Director with a remit that spans infrastructure ownership, cross-team technical collaboration, and the ability to float across streams and pick up whatever is most critical at any given point.

The nature of the role is breadth and depth in equal measure. One day you may be deep in a server performance issue for the MedCan WordPress estate; the next you are reviewing Dose’s payment gateway architecture or driving the security remediation programme. Context switching at pace - without losing technical rigour - is fundamental to how this role operates.

In practice, the role has two dimensions:

1. Technical ownership. - owning the group’s infrastructure, security governance, DNS, AI strategy, and platform-level decisions that require principal-level experience. This includes driving improvements to internal tooling and communications infrastructure - ensuring the business operates on the right foundations as it scales.

2. Cross-team technical collaboration. - supporting the Engineering Manager and delivery teams as a senior technical resource - available to dig into hard architectural or infrastructure problems and provide technical continuity across delivery streams when needed.

At the outset this is an individual contributor role with no people reporting line - influence through technical depth and judgement rather than hierarchy. That said, this role is not rigidly defined. We are looking for the right person first, and if that person brings people leadership as an additional strength, there is a natural opportunity for the role to evolve in that direction as the team grows. What matters most is exceptional technical ability and the drive to use it.

As an e-commerce and healthcare business, our platforms run 24/7. Occasionally that means responding to something outside of normal hours - this is part of the role and expected on those rare occasions when it’s needed. We are flexible in return: if you’ve been working late resolving a critical issue, you are not expected to be online first thing the following morning. The goal of this role is also to put the right guardrails in place so that those situations become increasingly rare.

What You’ll Own

Infrastructure & Security

• Own all DNS and domain management across the Naturecan group - a senior-only responsibility with significant business risk
• Lead the security audit remediation programme - driving findings from third-party security partners through to resolution
• Endpoint management and device security - Windows EOL, device encryption, endpoint tooling configuration, and Active Directory governance
• GCP and cloud infrastructure governance - security posture, access controls, cost management
• Oversee infrastructure migration for MedCan and related legacy server decommission
• Drive the migration of internal business communications onto modern, structured tooling - reducing reliance on informal channels and building an infrastructure that scales with the business
• Ongoing IT decisions that require senior judgement - device lifecycle, authorisation decisions, tooling governance across the group

MedCan - Platform Stability & Active Workstreams

• Work with the engineering team to formalise a clear stability plan for Mycannabis 360 and Mycannabis Wuppertal - addressing current performance constraints and ensuring the platform remains stable as clinic volumes and data grow
• Assess the right path forward for the MedCan WordPress estate: near-term improvements, plugin and database maintenance, monitoring and alerting - with migration to Dose as the longer-term destination
• Own the ongoing WordPress maintenance cadence: plugin security and rewrites, DB cleansing (every 3-6 months as order data grows), uptime monitoring improvements
• Teleclinic onboarding - technical oversight of the Clinics API and new integrations as MedCan scales its prescriber network
• Payment gateway integrations across the MedCan estate - future providers; implementation oversight and security review

Dose - Technical Oversight

• Payment gateway integration - senior technical oversight and review, working closely with the Dose team and Engineering Manager
• Architecture review on complex Dose decisions - regulatory data handling, CQC compliance, patient data security
• DevOps support for the Dose platform - CI/CD, environment management, deployment pipeline stability
• Cross-platform technical decisions, particularly where the Nowomed-to-Dose migration path intersects with MedCan infrastructure

AI Automation & Developer Productivity

• Support the Engineering Manager’s AI automation programme - contributing technically to the meeting-to-Jira pipeline, communications-to-ticket dashboard, and RAG systems across Jira, Confluence, and codebases
• Drive AI code completion and tooling adoption across both engineering teams - building shared workflow standards at scale
• Own the technical strategy for Claude Enterprise, API consumption governance, and MCP integration across the group
• Identify and ship AI-driven improvements that reduce manual overhead in sprint planning, incident response, and onboarding

Engineering Standards

• Set and maintain code review standards and engineering quality bar across Dose and MedCan teams
• A senior technical resource for the Engineering Manager and delivery teams - available to dig into the hard problems and bring them to resolution
• Technical mentoring for the Dose Engineering Lead and senior developers across both streams
• Developer productivity tooling - sprint analytics, Jira workflow improvements, shared tooling standards

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for someone with most of the following - you don’t need to tick every box:

Technical depth

• 8+ years of professional software development, with strong backend and systems-level experience
• Comfortable across a mixed stack: WordPress/PHP (MedCan estate), TypeScript/Bun.js (Dose). Node.js experience is directly transferable.
• Deep understanding of security architecture - authentication, authorisation, DNS/email security (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), endpoint management, access controls
• Infrastructure experience: cloud (GCP, AWS), VPS/dedicated server management, migrations, and infrastructure-as-code approaches
• Payment gateway integration experience - PSPs, webhooks, idempotency, and secure handling of payment flows in regulated contexts
• RESTful API design and review - able to audit, improve, and set standards across codebases you didn’t write
• WordPress performance, plugin management, and database optimisation - able to diagnose and resolve platform degradation under load

Regulated environment experience

• Experience working in healthcare, fintech, or other regulated environments where data security, audit trails, and compliance requirements shape technical decisions
• Familiarity with GDPR in a practical engineering context - not just as a compliance checkbox

AI tooling & automation

• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development - LLMs, MCP servers, RAG systems, and automation pipelines
• Ability to build and govern AI tooling at an organisational level - team-wide adoption, standards, and cost governance

Working style

• Thrives on context switching - equally at home firefighting a live server issue and progressing a longer-term security programme; able to reprioritise without losing momentum on either
• Operates autonomously and works at pace - picks up complex problems, drives them to resolution, and communicates clearly throughout
• Comfortable as a senior technical contributor without a people reporting line - influence through depth, not hierarchy
• Strong written communication - able to translate complex technical situations into clear, concise summaries for non-technical stakeholders
• Reliable under pressure - shows up on incidents, traces root causes quickly, and communicates clearly while doing it
• Comfortable with the realities of e-commerce and regulated healthcare - platforms run around the clock, and occasionally so do the people who build them

About the Team

The engineering team is small, direct, and high-trust. The Engineering Manager leads delivery across Dose and MedCan. The Dose team is a mix of FTE and senior contractors focused on the clinical platform. MedCan has a core senior developer and a growing clinic operation. Naturecan Core has two developers supporting ~50 Shopify stores.

You will report to the IT Director, work closely with the Engineering Manager, and have direct visibility into every significant technical decision across the group. You won't be operating in isolation - the IT Director works alongside you on the areas that need it, and the wider team is collaborative and high-trust.

This role is new. It was created to meet a structural need for a principal-level technical authority that can operate across every part of the group - picking up senior technical workstreams, supporting delivery teams, and building the technical foundation for a business scaling toward £150m in net sales. You will be building the function, not inheriting it.

What We Offer

Salary

Depending on experience

Location

Stockport office every Thursday; remote the rest of the week

Pension

Company pension scheme

Health

Private health insurance

Staff discount

Naturecan group product discount

AI Tooling

Claude Enterprise access - AI-assisted development workflows embedded in how we work

Culture

Small team, big ambition - genuine ownership and direct access to decision-makers

Process

Two-week sprints, retrospectives, pair working practices

Flexibility

We trust you to manage your time - if you’ve been working late on an incident, you are not expected in early the next morning

Equity

Meaningful equity conversation for the right candidate

Growth

Opportunity to build a team as the business scales

Interview Process

• Initial call (30 mins) - role overview and mutual fit
• Technical review (1 hour) - architecture, system design, prior work walkthrough
• Team meet - working practices, Q&A with the Engineering Manager and IT Director
• Offer