Principal Software Engineer; Platforms

Were building the UKs next generation engineering powerhouse providing critical technology that strengthens national security and resilience.

We specialise in turning advances in sensing AI and communications into operational capability for the edge where connectivity may be degraded or denied. Our work focuses on accelerating the deployment of technology improving decision-making for frontline teams and protecting people and critical assets in demanding environments.

Headquartered in Bristol Rowden employs around 200 people and operates over 20000 square feet of engineering and manufacturing facilities. We have a growing international footprint and are one of Europes fastest-growing engineering businesses.

About the role

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to build the Internal Developer Platform that our engineering teams depend on - a platform built from the ground up for agentic engineering. Our software teams work on hard problems under tight deadlines. Your job is to make sure the platform underneath them is not one of those problems.

Working within the Platforms team you will architect and own the tooling infrastructure workflows and components that Rowdens developers build on. That means repeatable development environments paved paths that are faster than the alternatives and platform services that teams adopt because they want to not because they have to.

You will lead the implementation of agentic AI and passionately advocate for its use: rolling out coding agents embedding them into CI/CD and day-to-day development and building the harnesses and infrastructure that let them run securely efficiently and transparently. You will track new developer tooling and agentic AI closely adopt what works before most teams have heard of it and enjoy convincing others to do the same.

This role gives you a whole engineering organisation to do that for.

This is some of the highest-impact engineering in the company. It is not a delivery role. You will not be assigned to customer projects and you will not review delivery PRs. Your users are Rowden engineers and the platform is the product.

Candidates must be eligible for SC clearance.

More information about security clearance is available here:

Salary

For senior roles compensation is tailored to the scope of the role and the specific experience a candidate brings. Because that can vary significantly we do not always publish a fixed salary band. We will however discuss compensation openly at the first stage of the process and can share an indicative range before either side invests significant time.

As a Principal Software Engineer at Rowden you will:

• Build the Internal Developer Platform: design build and run the platform that Rowdens software teams and their coding agents depend on to write test ship and operate code.
• Own software engineering infrastructure and workflows end-to-end: source control CI/CD artefact management secrets and the environments our software runs in.
• Champion new tooling and best practice: track what the best engineering organisations are doing evaluate it rigorously and bring in whatever earns its place.
• Raise standards through influence: set technical direction and standards across teams you do not manage by building things that people choose to use.
• Lead the implementation of agentic AI: roll out coding agents across engineering workflows and own how and where theyre used.
• Advocate for agentic engineering across the business: run evaluations evidence the benefits and train teams on effective use.
• Build the infrastructure that makes agents trustworthy: sandboxing permissioning audit logging and observability so that what an agent did is efficient secure and fully transparent to the engineer…