Principal Engineer

Principal Engineer

Competitive salary + bonus + benefits

Central London, flexible hybrid

Java · React / React Native · Kafka · Azure Kubernetes Service · GitHub Actions · Distributed systems

The opportunity

Our client, an established UK bank, is rethinking what a modern, relationship-led bank looks like. It's a business with real ambition for its next chapter, and engineering sits at the centre of that change.

As Principal Engineer, you'll be a senior technical leader in the bank's transformation engineering function. You'll co-own a product squad with a Product Manager and set the engineering direction for critical services across payments, onboarding, lending and core banking. You'll stay close to the code, shape the architecture and help squads ship safely, independently and often.

What you'll be doing

• Co-leading an engineering squad with a Product Manager, making pragmatic calls on scope, sequencing and approach
• Defining and evolving architecture across distributed systems, domain boundaries, APIs, event-driven integration, data flows and non-functional requirements
• Building and scaling cloud-native platforms that support continuous deployment and progressive release, so change reaches customers quickly and safely
• Leading from the front: pairing on hard problems, reviewing critical changes, unblocking delivery and coaching engineers through real work
• Driving engineering excellence – test automation, trunk-based development, CI/CD, secure coding, observability, SLOs and incident response
• Embedding AI-assisted engineering into everyday delivery (drafting, review, test generation, traceability), with human judgement and quality gates kept at the centre
• Designing robust vendor and third-party integration patterns, including COTS abstraction layers, bank-owned APIs and contract testing
• Building an open, inclusive engineering culture that values experimentation and continuous improvement

Risk is part of everything in banking. In this role that means building secure, resilient, well-governed and auditable technology from the start, and calling out concerns early.

What we're looking for

• Significant software engineering experience, ideally including principal-level technical leadership in agile, product-led or squad-based teams
• Strong architectural judgement across microservices, APIs, event streaming, data platforms, integration patterns and cloud-native design
• Hands-on credibility: depth in one or two areas, with breadth across front end, back end, data and infrastructure
• Deep experience with Kubernetes (or equivalent), infrastructure as code, CI/CD, progressive delivery, observability and production operations
• Confidence using AI-enabled engineering tools to improve quality, speed and traceability, with strong human oversight
• A track record of running secure, resilient and auditable services in a regulated or high-accountability environment
• Clear communication and coaching skills, and the ability to influence engineers, product, platform teams and third-party partners

Technologies you'll find here: GitHub Actions, Kafka, Kong, Databricks, Azure Kubernetes Service, React, React Native, Java, API gateways and automated testing.

Our client believes diverse teams are the best teams. If you can do much of what's described here but aren't sure you tick every box, we'd still love to hear from you. Flexible working requests are welcome too.