Principal​/Staff Engineer; Core Product

Location: Remote

Salary: £100,000 - £120,000

At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better.

We believe in a future of work in schools where being challenged doesn’t mean being burnt out and overworked. Where data guides progress without overwhelming staff. And where everyone working in a school is reminded why they got into education every day.

Our MIS and school management tools are already making a difference in over 12,000 schools and trusts. Giving time and power back to staff, turning data into clear, actionable insights, and supporting happier working days.

At the heart of our brand is a recognition that the challenges schools face today aren’t just about efficiency, outputs and productivity - but about creating happier working lives for the people who drive education everyday: the staff. We want to make schools more joyful places to work, as well as learn.

We are looking for an experienced and highly knowledgeable Principal/Staff Engineer (Core Product) to join our Engineering team and help drive architecture and technical strategy across our growing suite of core products. The remit and focus of the role is to work across domains on our most complex problems and critical initiatives, helping teams deliver outcomes whilst ensuring architectural excellence. Over time, this role will go where the value is, meaning you should be excited by working across a range of teams and priorities.

It’s a broad and exciting role, so we’re looking for someone up for a challenge - if you’re a collaborative and innovative candidate, this is the role for you.

• Own and deliver clear target architectures, strategies and roadmaps to support our product suite and strategic direction.
• Partner with Technical Leads to provide hands‑on guidance supporting feature delivery, tech debt paydown, and architecture improvements. (Hands‑on for this role means staying close to the details but not necessarily coding)
• Collaborate with Product Directors to understand product vision and translate this into deliverables, aligning commercial and engineering goals.
• Lead our shift to an AI‑First way of working, architecting new SDLC foundations and championing the latest approaches to help drive productivity gains across all teams
• Mentor and coach Technical Leads/Senior Engineers on architectural and engineering excellence, continually raising our bar and supporting career growth
• Act as a role model for technical leadership — work with pace, be pragmatic, and stay laser focused on outcomes not output
• Head up architectural reviews for your domain and ensure all designs meet Arbor’s quality, reliability, security and compliance standards.
• Collaborate with Staff Engineers and Principal Engineers to shape Arbor’s broader technology strategy, working outside your domain as needed
• Partner with Engineering Management to help grow teams, identify dependencies/risks, and report progress against strategic goals

• Extensive track record of delivering outcomes and leading across large, complex product suites, within a scaling and fast-moving environment.
• Broad understanding of software architecture, system design, and scalable integration patterns observed from a range of environments
• Examples of communication and influencing across technical and non-technical audiences to achieve positive outcomes.
• An ability to support the growth of engineers and technical leads whilst still delivering value across distributed, cross-functional teams.
• Demonstrable experience working in an ownership culture where quality, performance, observability, and security are a core responsibility for every engineer
• Deep experience guiding teams in architectural design, de-risking complex initiatives through MVP/0-1 thinking, and framework adoption
• An understanding and opinion on how AI‑first engineering will change the SDLC and ways of working, ideally with worked examples
• Examples of contributing to or leading technical communities of practice (e.g. chapters, guilds, architecture councils).
• Practical knowledge of and exposure to some of our core stack or equivalent technologies - PHP, Node,…