Principal Engineer — Digital Assets & AI-Enabled Engineering

Principal Engineer — Digital Assets & AI-Enabled Engineering

Location: London, Edinburgh, or Manchester

Employment type: Permanent

Working model: Hybrid; Two office days, flexible remote

About the role

Our Client in a major banking institution, and is building a shared digital-assets platform to support capabilities that can be used across its franchises.

The aim is to create common foundations rather than have individual teams build separate, siloed solutions.

As Principal Engineer, you’ll provide hands‑on technical leadership as the platform and team take shape.

You’ll help establish how the team designs, builds, tests, and operates digital-asset solutions—and help shape a development approach that uses AI agents as part of the delivery process from the outset.

This is a greenfield opportunity in a large financial institution: you’ll help create standards and make technical choices in a fast-evolving area, while working with product, business, and engineering colleagues across the bank.

What you’ll do

• Lead the technical design and delivery of reusable digital-assets platform capabilities, including areas such as asset storage, wallet management, and key management.
• Work with colleagues across franchises to identify common needs and shape solutions that can be used across the bank.
• Set clear architectural and engineering direction, including standards for design, maintainability, testing, and security.
• Help establish a specification-led, AI-agent-enabled development approach: turn requirements and constraints into clear instructions, coordinate agent‑assisted work, and keep people appropriately involved.
• Review and validate the quality, security, and suitability of AI-generated outputs.
• Stay hands‑on where needed, while also leading delivery through other engineers and supporting more junior colleagues.
• Keep projects moving, work through ambiguity, and adapt as priorities, technologies, and the digital‑assets landscape evolve.

What you’ll bring

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience making sound architecture and design decisions.
• The ability to judge whether software is secure, maintainable, testable, and fit for purpose—not just whether it runs.
• Technical leadership experience: you can guide engineers, support junior colleagues, influence stakeholders, and drive execution.
• Interest in using AI agents in software development, and willingness to work in a specification‑led way. You don’t need to have mastered every tool, but you should be keen to experiment and help establish effective practices.
• Comfort working in a changing environment where there may not yet be an established playbook.
• A self‑starting, curious, and resilient approach, with the ability to balance strategic thinking with practical delivery.

Technologies and domain

The team expects to work across different platforms and languages. Technologies may include Ethereum and Solidity, Canton and Daml, and Solana and Rust, as well as different backend approaches.

Deep expertise in every technology—or in one specific language—is not the central requirement. Strong fundamentals, good technical judgment, and the ability to learn and validate solutions across different stacks are more important.

Experience or interest in financial services and digital assets would be valuable.

The ideal candidate is someone who combines domain interest with a genuine willingness to explore AI-enabled development.

• Help build a shared digital-assets platform from the ground up.
• Shape engineering practices and technical standards in an emerging area.
• Help put AI-agent-enabled development into practice as a core way of working.
• Work in a team intended to combine the opportunity to experiment with the resources and stability of a large bank.

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