Principal Software Engineer

About The Role

Hippo is a rapidly growing digital consultancy passionate about building and delivering transformative digital solutions for a diverse range of Public and Private sector clients. We are recruiting for a Principal Software Engineer to join our Hippo Herd. We work at the intersection of strategy, design, and technology to solve complex problems and create lasting value. Our collaborative and agile culture empowers our teams to make a genuine impact.

As a Principal Software Engineer
, you will play an important role in making Hippo the best Consultancy out there. You will work as part of a multi-disciplinary team combining data, design, product, delivery, analysis, and engineering to deliver bespoke digital services that make a positive and meaningful impact on organisations and society. We’re confident in our abilities, authentic in our approach, and passionate about what we do.

You will act as a Principal Consultant to deliver Software Engineering services to our clients.
Principal Software Engineers at Hippo are strategic leaders who shape the technical direction of projects, drive innovation across the consultancy, and oversee multiple delivery streams within the Hippo engineering community.

Our solutions empower our customers to build and support secure, scalable, and well-engineered systems beyond traditional boundaries. We leverage deep data insights and continuous innovation to deliver awesome platforms that allow our customers to understand and get the most from their data and digital services. The Principal Software Engineer will be a key player and implementer in this mission.

• Provide strategic technical guidance across multiple squads as a high-level SME to ensure user-centred software follows best practice.
• Partner with senior stakeholders to explore, design and deliver innovative solutions to the most complex client problems.
• Oversee and optimise the design and management of complex software development and deployment pipelines, removing strategic bottlenecks.
• Direct the prioritisation of multi-team workloads, ensuring alignment with high-level operational priorities and complex work-streams.
• Act as a high-level communicator and presenter, representing Hippo’s technical vision to executive stakeholders.
• Drive strategic relationships with key stakeholders, ensuring that systemic engineering challenges are overcome.
• Drive the recruitment strategy for engineering and lead high-level professional development, coaching, and succession planning.
• Champion Hippo’s Engineering Herd globally through thought leadership, workshops, and industry conferences.

• Mastery of multiple modern programming languages and extensive engineering experience across diverse technology stacks (Python, Java, Node, etc.)
• Expert track record of leading multiple delivery teams to deliver enterprise-scale, high-quality, and technology-agnostic solutions.
• Strategic mastery in coaching and guiding senior engineers and leads to achieve optimal results.
• Exceptional verbal/written communication skills, with the ability to influence both technical and executive audiences.
• Expert knowledge of the full development lifecycle for user-centred digital solutions at scale.
• Advanced expertise in architectural strategies and technical roadmaps across diverse and complex environments.
• Expert level experience with containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes) and complex Microservices architectures.
• Strategic design of system integrations and large-scale application architectures.
• Mastery of agile methodologies and their application across large, distributed teams.
• Enterprise-level expertise in Infrastructure as Code and public cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Strategy-level experience with CI/CD tools and automation at an organisational level.

• Significant experience delivering high-profile GOV/NHS or enterprise-scale consultancy projects.
• Proven track record of shaping organisational engineering standards or cultures.

Alongside working with some of the most talented people out there and on-top of a competitive salary, which…