Principal Engineer

Job Type: Permanent

Location: Hybrid: London, Telford, Birmingham or Edinburgh with occasional travel to office locations as required.

Flexible working: All roles are open to part-time, job-share and other types of flexibility. We will discuss what is important to you and balancing this with business requirements during the recruitment process. You can read more about flexible working here.

Closing Date: 28/10/26

Salary and benefits: From £85,000 plus an indicative bonus range of 30-60%, private medical cover, 38 days annual leave, excellent pension, 12x salary life assurance, career breaks, income protection, 3x volunteering days and much more.

Who are we?

We’re Standard Life, a retirement specialist focused entirely on retirement savings and income. We champion the belief that everyone’s journey to and through retirement can be better, and for more than 200 years, we’ve been helping our customers plan and prepare for their financial futures.

Life today is increasingly complicated, uncertain and unpredictable. People move through different careers, face unexpected moments and navigate important choices. We offer our colleagues flexibility, trust and benefits that work for whatever life brings. In return we expect curiosity, connection, accountability and high standards. We make room for what matters - so you can bring your best, every day.

The role

As Principal Technology Solutions Lead across our customer-facing digital platforms, you will act as the senior technical authority for a strategic capability used to deliver secure, resilient and high-performing customer journeys. You will set the technical vision and target architecture, own the capability roadmap and provide hands-on leadership across engineering teams, technical leads, architects, product teams and delivery partners.

The role will have a strong emphasis on our customer-facing web platform, where deep expertise in AWS and modern digital engineering is essential, while also providing technical leadership and support across other digital platforms and cloud technologies where priorities and opportunities require it.

You will champion resilient architecture and an AI-enabled software development lifecycle, introducing pragmatic ways to use AI across discovery, design, build, test, assurance, documentation and operations while maintaining appropriate engineering controls and human accountability. Operating with a high degree of autonomy, you will translate business priorities into coherent technical outcomes and executable plans, identify risks and dependencies early, and provide clear recommendations that improve decision quality and delivery confidence.

• Own and continuously evolve the technical vision, target architecture, engineering principles and outcome-based roadmap for the customer-facing digital platform, connecting business outcomes to sequencing, dependencies, technical debt, investment choices and measurable improvements.
• Act as the senior technical authority for the platform, guiding significant architecture, design and technology decisions across AWS, web applications, APIs, content, integration and engineering tooling, while applying the same judgement to other platforms and cloud technologies as the remit evolves.
• Provide technical leadership across multiple engineering teams, functions and partners, creating alignment on priorities, dependencies, standards and delivery outcomes without relying on formal authority.
• Champion resilient architecture and modern operational practices, including security by design, observability, performance engineering, capacity planning, disaster recovery, fault isolation and effective incident learning.
• Drive modern digital engineering practices across cloud-native development, DevSecOps, automated testing, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, progressive delivery and reliable route-to-live controls.
• Establish an AI-enabled SDLC, enabling responsible use of AI-assisted engineering to improve flow, quality and developer experience while ensuring appropriate governance, assurance, traceability and human oversight.
• Maintain clear visibility of technical debt, obsolescence, platform risks and systemic weaknesses, converting them into prioritised treatment plans with accountable owners, milestones and time-bound remediation.
• Work with Product Owners and Delivery Leads to ensure strategic priorities have credible integrated plans, clear outcomes and transparent delivery confidence, intervening early and following corrective actions through where direction or ownership is weak.
• Provide concise, proactive and audience-appropriate communication on outcomes, progress, risks, dependencies and delivery confidence, pairing material escalations with clear options, recommendations and decision requests.
• Step into complex, ambiguous or challenged initiatives to establish material facts, distinguish root causes from symptoms, evaluate credible options and lead pragmatic recovery through to restored ownership and delivery confidence.
• Shape investment, sourcing and prioritisation decisions by connecting technical choices to customer and business value, whole-life cost, reuse, simplification, operational risk and supplier outcomes.
• Develop Technology Solutions Leads, Software Engineer Leads and senior engineers by delegating meaningful technical ownership, strengthening their judgement and enabling them to own roadmaps, decisions, stakeholder communication and outcomes with increasing autonomy.

What are we looking for?

• Significant experience providing senior technical leadership for large-scale customer-facing platforms, with evidence of owning technical direction and influencing outcomes across multiple teams, functions or programmes.
• Deep expertise in public cloud architecture and engineering, including designing secure, scalable, resilient and observable services using cloud-native and managed capabilities, combined with the ability to transfer that expertise across other cloud technologies and platform contexts.
• Broad practical knowledge of modern digital platform engineering, including web applications, distributed systems, APIs, integration, DevSecOps, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated quality controls, observability and site reliability engineering.
• Experience introducing or scaling AI-enabled software engineering practices across the SDLC, with a clear understanding of responsible adoption, assurance, security, intellectual property, data protection and human accountability.
• Strong technical judgement and senior stakeholder leadership, including the ability to simplify complex or ambiguous situations, present evidence-based options and recommendations, manage cross-team dependencies, influence investment decisions and develop other technical leaders.

We want to hire the whole version of you.

We are committed to ensuring that everyone feels accepted and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. If your experience looks different from what we’ve advertised and you believe that you can bring value to the role, we’d love to hear from you.

If you require any adjustments to the recruitment process, please let us know so we can help you to be at your best.

We’re reviewing applications as they come in, so apply early to avoid missing out.

Find out more about working at Standard Life

• Guide for Candidates: standardlifeplc.pagetiger.com/guideforcandidates

• Find or get answers from our colleagues: www.standardlifeplc.com/careers/talk-to-us