Principal Engineer

Principal Engineer – AI & Cloud Modernisation

Are you a hands-on Principal Engineer who wants to shape the future of a large-scale, customer-facing platform while helping drive a major transition towards cloud-native and AI-enabled technology?

We’re working with a global technology business that is modernising a highly complex, established software platform and looking for a Principal Engineer to help define the technical direction across the product ecosystem.

This is a high-impact role for someone who enjoys operating at the intersection of architecture, engineering leadership, cloud modernisation and AI .

The role

As a Principal Engineer, you'll provide technical leadership across multiple engineering teams and play a key role in defining the future architecture, engineering standards and technology roadmap.

You'll be expected to remain technically credible and hands-on while operating at a broader organisational level — influencing senior engineers, architects, product leaders and engineering teams.

You'll be responsible for:

• Setting technical direction and architectural standards across multiple teams and domains
• Leading the modernisation of complex legacy applications into scalable, cloud-native platforms
• Designing highly available, resilient and high-performance customer-facing systems
• Identifying opportunities to incorporate AI and GenAI into products and engineering workflows
• Evaluating emerging technologies and translating them into practical product opportunities
• Leading architecture and design reviews, assessing technical trade-offs and managing technology risk
• Establishing engineering standards around design patterns, coding practices, testing and DevOps
• Mentoring and developing senior engineers and helping raise engineering capability across the organisation
• Troubleshooting complex technical challenges and providing direction through critical incidents
• Influencing technical strategy and roadmap decisions across organisational boundaries
• Acting as a technical thought leader, bringing new ideas and industry best practices into the organisation

What we're looking for

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience
• A strong track record building scalable, resilient web-based products
• Expert-level experience with C# / .NET
• Strong object-oriented design and software engineering fundamentals
• Excellent understanding of SOLID, DRY, DDD, design patterns and database architecture
• Experience designing high-traffic, performant REST APIs , ideally with ASP.NET
• Strong understanding of modern frontend technologies such as React, Angular and TypeScript
• Experience with Node.js and Python
• Strong public cloud experience, ideally AWS
• Experience across technologies such as EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, SQS, containers, load balancing and autoscaling
• Experience modernising large, complex legacy applications into cloud-native architectures
• Practical experience with AI/GenAI , including areas such as RAG, prompt engineering and fine-tuning
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, scalability and reliability
• The ability to influence and communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• A proven ability to mentor engineers and drive engineering best practices

You'll have the opportunity to influence the technical direction of a major product ecosystem , work across multiple engineering teams and help shape how an established technology platform evolves into a modern, cloud-native and AI-enabled environment.

You'll be joining at an important point in the transformation, with the opportunity to influence architecture, AI adoption, engineering standards and long-term technology strategy while helping teams navigate the realities of modernising a complex legacy platform.

If you're a Principal or Staff-level engineer who enjoys solving large-scale technical problems, influencing engineering strategy and getting hands-on with modern cloud and AI technologies, this could be a strong fit.