Principal Software Engineer in London

At Automata, we are on a mission to transform how scientists work by making automation accessible to every lab in the world. We believe that by giving labs the power to automate, we can unlock discoveries that will shape the future of life sciences—from diagnostics and drug discovery to synthetic biology.

We design and operate a software platform that orchestrates robots, instruments, data pipelines, and increasingly AI-driven workflows — helping labs move from bespoke, fragile setups to scalable, software-defined automation. Our systems sit at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, orchestration engines, and real-world physical constraints.

We are a product-driven company operating at scale, with customers doing genuinely meaningful scientific work that saves lives. Our engineering challenges are real: complex workflows, reliability at scale, performance under constraints, and building platforms that can evolve as new products and capabilities are layered on.

We believe great products come from strong technical leadership, clarity of direction, and teams that move at pace. We work closely together, value in-person collaboration, and operate from a modern Central London office designed for focus, energy, and momentum.

Why Work at Automata?

• Impact: Your work will directly contribute to advancements in science and medicine, supporting labs around the globe as they push boundaries in research and innovation.
• Innovation: You will be part of a team solving complex problems using cutting-edge technology.
• Growth: We invest in our people through hands-on experience, professional development, or collaborative projects.
• Community: Join a diverse, passionate team that values collaboration.

What we are looking for

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer who will play a defining role in shaping our platform, our teams, and our technical future. This is a top-end role with significant architectural authority and organisational influence. You will lead and mentor senior technical leaders, own core architectural decisions, and help scale a stable platform into a multi-product foundation while remaining hands-on and deeply technical.

You have likely built and scaled complex systems before, possibly as a CTO or equivalent in a smaller company, and you have also seen what 'good' looks like in more structured, corporate or enterprise environments. You understand the trade-offs between speed and quality, pragmatism and long-term sustainability.

This role reports to the VP of Product and offers a fast growth path for someone who demonstrates the appetite and capability.

Who you are

• You are a builder and a leader, not one or the other.
• You are outcome-focused — you care deeply about impact, not just elegant solutions.
• You thrive in complexity and ambiguity, and you bring structure, clarity, and momentum where it's missing.
• You are technically opinionated but pragmatic, knowing when to push for the right long-term decision and when to ship and iterate.
• You enjoy working with other senior engineers, raising the bar through example, coaching, and clear technical direction.
• You communicate clearly — with engineers, product managers, and non-technical stakeholders.
• You move fast, but you don't cut corners on reliability or maintainability.
• You are motivated by growth: growing products, growing teams, and growing yourself into bigger leadership challenges.
• You listen and learn as much as you lead and direct, balancing each opportunity to grow yourself while also helping peers and businesses grow.
• You are excited by the idea of building scalable, modular, high-quality platforms that enable others to move faster and build better products.

What you will do

• Own architecture and technical direction.
• Define, evolve, and own the end-to-end technical architecture across our core platform and new products.
• Act as the final technical decision-maker on architecture, core technologies, and engineering approaches.
• Design systems that are scalable, resilient, secure, and adaptable as the business grows.
• Stay hands-on: contribute to critical designs, core platform modules, prototypes, and apply your coding skills where it matters most.
• Lead and multiply senior engineers.
• Help staff engineers lead their squads effectively, making better technical and organisational decisions.
• Structure teams and responsibilities to improve pace, ownership, and clarity.
• Drive a healthy engineering function, ensuring pace is balanced with the needs of engineers, towards a sustainable model.
• Increase engineering pace without sacrificing reliability or maintainability.
• Identify and address scaling pain points, technical debt, and delivery bottlenecks.
• Champion lean, effective engineering processes that support fast, predictable delivery.
• Drive measurable improvements in platform stability, performance, and developer productivity.
• Partner with product and customers.
• Work closely with Product, Design, Delivery, Sales and Customer Success to ensure strong alignment between product intent and technical execution.
• Translate product language into architecture and delivery plans.
• Build cloud and edge-connected systems.
• Design and evolve event-driven and data-streaming architectures.
• Lead engineering practices in cloud-native environments (Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, IaC, security).
• Enable data and AI-driven capabilities.

Your background

• 12–18 years of professional software engineering experience, with deep backend and some platform focus.
• Strong expertise in Golang; comfortable reasoning about Python-based systems.
• Experience building products end-to-end, ideally including at least one built from scratch and scaled.
• Strong system design and distributed systems experience.
• Exposure to Kubernetes, containerisation, CI/CD, IaC, security, and modern delivery practices.
• Experience influencing and leading senior technical people.
• Prior CTO (at a startup), Principal Engineer, or equivalent senior technical leadership experience is a strong plus.

Growth & impact

This role is designed for someone who wants real influence today and a fast growth path tomorrow. You will be trusted with critical technical decisions, visible impact, and leadership of senior engineers — with a clear opportunity to grow fast as the organisation scales.

If you're excited by hard problems, meaningful products, and building platforms that matter — we would love to talk.

UK Team Benefits:

• Vitality Health Insurance
• Eye Care
• Salary Sacrifice - EV
• Salary Sacrifice - Bike & Tech
• Wellbeing & Support
• Wellbeing & Development Allowance
• Spill & Employee Assistance Programme
• Additional Leave
• Pension Scheme
• Group Life & Critical Illness cover

We are an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Discrimination of any kind based on race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status is strictly prohibited.