Principal Engineer , London, Toronto

Appnovation is a global, full-service digital partner that combines Strategy, Experience & Design, Engineering and Managed Services. We build digital solutions that deliver real impact today and serve as foundations for future growth. Bold ambition. Practical action. Endless possibilities.

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to own the end-to-end technical coherence of an enterprise marketing technology ecosystem for our life sciences clients. In most large organizations, content is created and approved in one system, delivered as an experience in another, and measured in a third, each run by a different team and vendor. When the seams between them are well designed, a business result can be traced back to the asset and workflow that drove it.

When they are not, creators can't see how their work performs, publishers can't prove impact, and analysts spend more time reconciling data than finding insight.

This is a senior technical leadership role with no direct reports. You will set a single, clear technical direction across multiple platform teams, making sure their architectures, data contracts and roadmaps fit together as one system. You will lead through clarity and credibility rather than reporting lines, and you will help shape new AI-enabled patient and healthcare professional (HCP) experiences that can be built safely, approved and proven in production, not just shown in a prototype.

• Technical Direction: Define and own one clear technical approach across content creation, governance and approval; publishing, experience delivery and design systems; and measurement, tagging and reporting, with special focus on the content-to-experience and experience-to-insight handoffs.
• Cross-Team Standards: Set shared standards for API contracts, metadata and taxonomy, data governance and security, so a decision made by one team doesn't create rework or data gaps for another.
• Architecture Reviews and Decisions: Lead architecture reviews and RFCs across platform teams, act as the escalation point for the hardest cross-team problems (migrations, vendor consolidation, build vs. buy), and keep a written record of what was decided and why.
• End-to-End Data Traceability: Own the technical strategy for tracing content, experience and performance data from asset, through publication, to the results it produced.
• AI-Enabled Patient and HCP Experiences: Partner with client experience leaders to turn business ambitions into buildable technical approaches, including making services callable by AI assistants and agents and engaging on third-party platforms the client doesn't control.
• Reusable AI Capabilities: Lead a shared layer of AI skills, agents and services that delivery teams and the wider organization can reuse, instead of every team building its own.
• Senior Stakeholder Partnership: Represent engineering to senior client leaders on major trade-offs around cost, risk, scale and sequencing, and explain technical positions in terms that work for marketing, compliance and finance audiences.
• Innovation with Delivery Focus: Prove ideas quickly and cheaply, stop them when they don't work, bring medical, legal, regulatory, privacy and security partners in at the design stage, and get committed approaches into production within a few months.
• Technical Mentorship: Mentor senior engineers across platform teams and raise the technical bar through design reviews and hands‑on involvement in the toughest problems.

• 12+ years of software and platform engineering experience, with a track record of designing systems that span organizational boundaries, not just technical ones.
• Proven success getting multiple engineering roadmaps to line up around shared data contracts and standards.
• E…