Principal Engineer

CreateFuture is fast becoming the UK’s most recognisable digital consultancy, with years of experience building digital products and services for major organisations whilst putting our people first. We have offices in the centre of Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, and London as well as remote employees located throughout the country. We are a team of creators - whether that’s code, project plans, go to market strategies, culture initiatives, marketing campaigns, large language models or people policies. And together, with our clients, we create the future.

This has seen us collaborate and partner across a multitude of industries and sectors, with the likes of PayPal, adidas, Natwest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert, to name just a few. Our reputation as a partner determined to deliver high-quality, robust and thoughtful products has enabled us to scale to over 500 people in the last couple of years, and it is our amazing people - along with the safe, supportive and friendly culture we have built - that makes CreateFuture a great place to work. Don’t just take our word for it though, we have been recognised by Best Workplaces UK multiple years in a row - across a number of categories - and our employee exit rate is astonishingly low. Join us on our journey… Let’s create something awesome, together, today.

About the role:

As a Principal Engineer you will work closely with clients, responsible for the successful delivery of client and internal projects through building professional relationships with key client stakeholders, challenging where appropriate, and using your technical expertise to set and provide best practice advice and processes within your project team and wider capability.

What you’ll be doing:

• Technical Strategy & Leadership: Defines and implements technical strategies, ensuring best practices in architecture, security, and quality throughout all engineering and client projects.
• Engineering Leadership: Acts as Lead Engineer on client projects, overseeing RFPs and BIDs while collaborating with the sales team for effective execution.
• Consultancy & Business Growth: Applies a growth mindset, identifies revenue opportunities, and collaborates with the commercial team to secure additional work.
• Knowledge & Capability Development: Serves as a subject matter expert, mentors engineers, and is responsible for ensuring the engineering capability’s skills and development aligns with client needs and market trends.
• Pre-Sales & Client Engagement: Leading engineering contributions in pre-sales, determines client requirements, and represents CreateFuture through events, speaking, and blogging.
• Emerging Technologies & Industry Influence: Stays ahead of industry trends, contributes to thought leadership, and enhances Create Future’s reputation through public engagements.
• Team Leadership & Culture: Fosters a collaborative, inclusive, and psychologically safe environment, advocating for team growth and organisational values.

We’d love to talk to you if you:

• Proven experience as a technical leader, balancing hands-on technical skills with client delivery and stakeholder management expertise.
• Strong ability to build client relationships, understand their challenges, and provide effective solutions across technical and project management aspects.
• Demonstrable expertise in your chosen technologies, with the ability to mentor and grow the skills of groups of engineers.
• Ideally, you have an industry presence in your technology passions.
• Commercial experience with one or more technical stacks: Java, .NET, Typescript (Backend/Frontend), React, NodeJS, and modern cloud infrastructure (ideally AWS or Azure).
• You are experienced in contributing to sales and shaping how engagements are delivered in a consultancy setting.

As this is a hybrid role, we’re looking for people within a commuting distance of our hub locations (Edinburgh/Leeds/Manchester/London) and who are flexible to travel to client sites and CreateFuture regional offices. We are very flexible and trust you to manage your own schedule to balance face-to-face time with clients, colleagues and working from home. We create and reinforce a culture that rewards employees’ impact, not just activity. We trust our employees to work autonomously and promote ownership across all levels.

We believe that representative teams made up of people with different backgrounds, skills, and points of view help us build the best workplace possible, and enable us to create genuinely innovative, broadly useful products. We are committed to our goal of creating the most inclusive workplace possible. As we strive to build an environment where everyone can thrive and be themselves, we will continue to investigate and challenge biases, while working to identify and remove obstacles to inclusion. If you need additional support or accommodation during the application process, please don’t hesitate to let us know.