Principal Engineer - SC Cleared

We’re looking for an experienced Principal Engineer to provide strong technical leadership within a collaborative, product-focused engineering environment.

In this role, you’ll set technical direction, translate architectural designs into actionable engineering work, and ensure high technical quality across team deliverables. You’ll work closely with delivery leadership to define, prioritise, estimate and refine technical backlogs, so strong agile software delivery experience is essential.

• Translate architectural designs into clear, prioritised engineering backlogs
• Identify where technical spikes are required to de-risk delivery and define the optimal delivery sequence
• Form hypotheses on potential technical approaches to complex problems
• Design and deliver experimental spikes using cloud-native services and bespoke code
• Define technical tasks and estimate implementation effort
• Present evidence-based outcomes to enable data-driven decisions for future product team approaches

• Write clean, maintainable, high-quality code
• Champion agile best practices and Continuous Delivery
• Work hands‑on as part of a delivery team building innovative software
• Mentor and support other engineers
• Collaborate effectively with QAs, BAs and architects
• Build strong working relationships across disciplines
• Facilitate problem‑solving and guide teams from idea to delivery
• Thrive in a dynamic, collaborative, transparent and non‑hierarchical environment

You’re an enthusiastic and experienced Principal Engineer with a strong technical background and the ability to inspire delivery teams through hands‑on leadership.

You are:

• T‑shaped, with deep technical expertise and the flexibility to support across the team when needed
• Comfortable stepping outside your normal scope to help unblock delivery
• An open‑minded, quick learner, happy to pick up new technologies (including legacy systems where required)
• Very comfortable with back‑end development on the Java platform, with testing experience using Bruno
• Experienced in agile, product‑centric software delivery

• Hands‑on technical planning, task breakdown, estimation and prioritisation
• Build tooling, CI and CD pipelines and modern delivery approaches
• Agile engineering practices including TDD, pair or collaborative programming, and continuous delivery

• Key technical skills Java / Spring microservices
• Kubernetes on AWS
• REST APIs
• Hibernate
• Debezium
• Messaging technologies (SNS / SQS or similar)
• AWS RDS (Postgres)
• AWS Open Search
• AWS API Gateway
• Jenkins
• Git version control
• Docker
• React
• GDS Design System
• Node.js
• Storybook
• AWS native services (e.g. Lambda and related services)