Principal Software Engineer

Overview

This role provides senior technical leadership across multiple teams, helping to shape architecture, engineering practices, and modernisation efforts. You will work through influence, contributing hands‑on where it matters most, while supporting teams to build secure, scalable, and resilient systems. The role focuses on long‑term technical health, collaboration, and practical innovation, including the responsible use of AI in software development.

The Submissions Technology group builds and operates platforms that support the scholarly publishing lifecycle—from submission and peer review through to editorial decisions and publication.

• Lead through influence to align technical direction across teams and domains
• Partner with architects, engineering leaders, and product teams to shape strategy and execution
• Define and evolve domain architecture, service boundaries, and integration patterns
• Contribute directly to complex or high-risk engineering work where it adds the most value
• Drive modernisation efforts, reducing technical debt and evolving toward cloud‑native patterns
• Improve operational excellence through observability, automation, resilience, and incident learning
• Establish pragmatic technical standards and promote consistency across teams
• Mentor engineers in architecture, systems thinking, and engineering best practices

• Experience operating as a senior or principal engineer across multiple teams or domains
• Proven ability to influence architectural direction and drive cross-team technical change
• Strong background in distributed systems, APIs, and integration patterns
• Experience with event‑driven architectures and modern cloud‑based systems
• Backend engineering expertise with Java, Spring Boot, and microservices
• Familiarity with modern frontend technologies and polyglot environments
• Experience with containerisation, CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure as Code
• Hands‑on experience with AI‑assisted development tools and applying GenAI concepts in production

We promote a healthy work/life balance across the organisation.

We offer an appealing working prospect for our people, with numerous wellbeing initiatives, shared parental leave, study assistance, and sabbaticals to help you meet your immediate responsibilities and your long‑term goals.

Working Pattern:
Working flexible hours – flexing the times when you work in the day to help you fit everything in and work when you are the most productive.