Principal Engineer - 944478 (REMOTE PH)

Principal Engineer

AI-Assisted Development  ·  Remote, Philippines

About the Opportunity

Expansion International is partnering with a global data and consumer insights business to recruit a Principal Engineer. Our client is one of the world's leading sources of intelligence on the attitudes, behaviours, and consumption habits of young people and families, tracking millions of people across more than 20 markets and delivering data and analysis to clients in media, entertainment, licensing, sport, and the toys and games industry.

Over the past year the business has completed a significant technology transformation: moving to public cloud, decoupling legacy monoliths, and re-architecting core workloads to be more scalable and resilient. With that foundation now in place, the focus is shifting back to product development. The team is building an AI assistant with MCP servers, APIs, and a web app, with a roadmap that runs into 2027.

This is a new role that reflects a deliberate step to grow the engineering team and build pace in delivery. It is also the client's first remote hire of this kind, so the person who joins will help set the standard for how remote engineering works alongside the in-house team.

The Role

This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role for an engineer with at least eight years of experience, the most senior IC on the engineering team. You will write code, own architectural decisions, and raise the standard of how the team builds, all without a management title. You will report directly to the VP Engineering and work within a small, close-knit team.

The team runs full stack in the truest sense: engineers build their entire product output, from the data pipeline through to the product surface, rather than handing infrastructure to a separate function. You will offer architectural guidance to other engineers, bring product thinking to your work, and move quickly using modern AI-assisted development.

Because the team is small and self-directed, this role suits someone who works from an outcome rather than a detailed backlog. You will be given a problem to solve and the autonomy to solve it, so the ideal person is tenacious, resourceful, and comfortable making well-reasoned decisions on their own.

Key Responsibilities

• Own architectural decisions across the product and data platform, establishing patterns and keeping today's build from becoming tomorrow's debt.

• Write production code across the stack and ship it, using agentic coding tools to move quickly without compromising quality.

• Build repeatable patterns and automations that let AI take on more of the repetitive work, and share those practices so the whole team gets faster.

• Lead technical discovery on complex or ambiguous problems, breaking them down and creating clarity for others to execute.

• Set and maintain engineering standards across quality, testing, deployment, observability, and security.

• Provide architectural guidance to other engineers, acting as the technical authority through expertise and trust rather than title.

• Work closely with the VP Engineering to keep technical direction and product ambition aligned.

• Contribute to data engineering work, from capture and transformation through to the databases that serve the products.

Required Skills & Experience

• A minimum of 8 years of software engineering experience, with clear progression to a senior level and the depth expected of the most senior engineer on a team.

• Genuine, demonstrable experience with agentic coding, this is the single most important requirement. Not only using AI tools to produce code, but building repeatable patterns and automations, and rolling those practices out so a whole team works faster. The client currently uses Claude Code; comparable tools such as Cursor are welcome, as the underlying skill is transferable.

• Strong architectural fundamentals: you have designed systems that had to scale and lived with the consequences, and you understand how to run workloads in public cloud effectively (scalability, resilience, high availability).

• Solid public cloud experience. Deep AWS is an advantage, but strong experience with another major cloud (for example GCP) is fine where your architectural fundamentals are sound.

• Production experience with modern TypeScript, React, and Next.js.

• A genuine full-stack builder who can own an entire product output end to end, including the infrastructure layer.

• Strong general software principles that transfer across languages. The team writes Python for data pipelines and some APIs, and maintains some existing PHP, so comfort reading and working across languages matters.

• The ability to influence without authority: you lead through credibility, clarity, and consistency.

• A delivery and product-engineering mindset: you work backwards from outcomes, consider the product and its commerciality, and know how to ship.

• Remote and Philippines-based (PHT, UTC+8), working hours aligned to UK business hours (BST/GMT). You are ready to keep the right touch points and overlap with the UK team.

Nice to Have

Experience with any of the following would be advantageous but is not essential:

• A grounding in statistics, mathematics, or data science. This is a data business, so quantitative reasoning is genuinely useful.

• Experience with data pipelines or analytical infrastructure, or how data moves and transforms at scale.

• PHP or Laravel, for working with existing systems.

• Experience in analytics, research technology, or consumer insights platforms.

We're Looking For Someone Who

• Is highly autonomous and self-directed, able to take an outcome and build the path to deliver it.

• Is tenacious and resilient: keeps going when they hit a speed bump, turns over rocks, and works problems through to a solution rather than waiting for direction.

• Makes sound decisions grounded in both good technology and good product thinking, and knows when to sense-check an approach before running with it.

• Communicates clearly in writing and builds trust across a remote team.

• Picks up new technologies and domain knowledge quickly, using modern tooling to accelerate.

• Cares about craft, pragmatism, and pace in equal measure.

Preferred Background

We are particularly interested in professionals who have experience working in:

• Data, analytics, or research-technology businesses.

• Product-led engineering teams that build customer-facing tools on top of data.

• Small or lean teams where engineers own delivery end to end with minimal hand-holding.

Why Join This Opportunity?

• Genuine technical ownership as the most senior individual contributor, setting direction without the constraints of a management role.

• A fresh product roadmap after a major transformation: an AI assistant, MCP servers, APIs, and a web app, with real scope to shape what gets built.

• A team that has embraced AI-assisted development as a genuine productivity multiplier, with access to the right tools and a budget for agentic development.

• A high-autonomy, low-bureaucracy environment where you are trusted to solve problems your way.

• A fully remote role, Philippines-based, working alongside a UK engineering team.

• The chance to make real impact at a growing international data business operating across more than 20 markets.