Principal Software Engineer in Manchester

Interact provides enterprise-grade intranet software that connects over three million employees to leading global names like Levi's, Domino’s, Teva Pharmaceuticals, and Technicolor. Our team is devoted to helping organizations communicate better by continually improving every service and product we offer. With offices in Manchester, New York, Dubai, Tulsa, and Warsaw, we operate across North America, EMEA, and Australia. We treat everyone with respect and honesty, upholding the motto that our people are our most valuable assets.

A Principal Software Engineer will be a hands-on engineer responsible for fast development of strategic functionality, AI integrations in the core product, shaping the architecture, driving engineering excellence, and delivering complex features across our platform used by millions of users globally. A core part of the role is end-to-end execution of AI integrations into our existing ecosystem, including architecture, implementation, governance, and enablement across squads. You will combine deep technical capability with strong leadership influence—mentoring engineers, guiding technical strategy, and personally contributing high-quality code across our stack (C#, ASP.NET, ReactJS, Node.js, SQL Server, AWS).

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and ship high-quality, production-grade software using C#, ASP.NET, ReactJS, Node.js, SQL Server, and AWS services.
• Serve as a hands-on architect/engineer—writing foundational code, delivering end-to-end features, validating technical approaches through prototypes and spikes, and leading design discussions.
• Maintain deep familiarity with the codebase and actively contribute to critical, high-impact features and refactoring initiatives.
• Define and uphold engineering standards across squads, including SOLID, design patterns, secure coding, and observability principles.
• Evaluate technical trade-offs, performance implications, and long-term maintainability to steer architectural direction.
• Lead and implement AI-powered features across Interact’s ecosystem, including intelligent search, summarisation, classification, recommendation systems, generative capabilities, experience augmentation, insights generation, etc.
• Develop secure and scalable AI integration layers using modern patterns (embeddings, RAG, vector databases, prompt orchestration, evaluation frameworks).
• Build and maintain AI-related services, APIs, and backend components—including telemetry, evaluation pipelines, and guardrails.
• Establish best practices for responsible AI, including privacy, compliance, red-teaming, fallback logic, and model governance.
• Partner with Product to prioritise AI initiatives and define measurable success metrics for user experience and business impact.
• Create reusable AI components, SDKs, documentation, and guidelines for wider engineering use.
• Lead cross-team initiatives, unblock complex technical challenges, and ensure architectural alignment across the organisation.
• Work closely with Product & Delivery Managers to refine requirements, shape roadmaps, and ensure predictable delivery.
• Break down complex problems and guide teams through execution—participating directly in coding when needed.
• Champion testing excellence: author and maintain unit tests, integration tests, and Playwright end-to-end tests.
• Work closely with DevOps to optimise CI/CD pipelines and improve deployment reliability.
• Conduct in-depth code reviews, provide hands-on pairing, and ensure code quality across multiple squads.
• Optimise performance across APIs, databases, caching, distributed systems, and front-end rendering.
• Maintain hands-on involvement in resolving complex production issues, run post-mortems, and design long-term solutions.
• Develop secure-by-default features and collaborate with Security to ensure AI and platform components meet compliance requirements.
• Contribute to scalable AWS infrastructure design and cost-efficient resource usage.
• Mentor engineers of all levels—especially Senior and Staff engineers—to elevate technical thinking and delivery quality.
• Facilitate design clinics, architecture reviews, and knowledge-sharing sessions, including AI education and literacy.
• Contribute to hiring pipelines through technical interviews and role calibrations.
• Stay ahead of industry trends in AI, cloud, web engineering, and developer tooling.
• Initiate and lead innovation spikes, proofs-of-concept, technical evaluations, and platform enhancements.
• Promote continuous improvement and foster a culture of curiosity and craftsmanship.
• Demonstrate hands-on technical leadership with a bias for action and ownership, and communicate complex systems clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Collaborate effectively as a team player who uplifts others and balances immediate delivery with long-term architecture needs.

About The Role:

• 10+ years of professional engineering experience, including designing and delivering large-scale, distributed systems.
• Proven track record of hands-on development across back-end (C#, ASP.NET) and front-end (ReactJS) environments.
• Extensive experience integrating AI/LLM technologies into production environments.
• Strong competence with SQL Server, T-SQL, performance tuning, caching (Redis), ElasticSearch/OpenSearch, and distributed systems patterns.
• Experience operating in Agile/Scrum and collaborating closely with Product, Delivery, QA, and DevOps.
• Strong Git and CI/CD experience (Bitbucket, TeamCity, Octopus Deploy).
• Real-world experience designing secure, scalable, resilient systems on AWS.
• Expert understanding of OOP, SOLID principles, design patterns, data structures, and algorithms.
• Deep knowledge of asynchronous processing, concurrency, distributed architectures, and high-volume transactional systems.
• Working knowledge of Docker, containerised workloads, and cloud-native best practices.
• Understanding of modern AI integration patterns: embeddings, vectors, RAG, prompt engineering, evaluation techniques, model safety.
• Strong familiarity with Atlassian tools (Jira, Confluence).
• Hands-on technical leader with a bias for action and ownership.
• Excellent communicator who can simplify complex systems for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Pragmatic, user-centric problem solver with strong attention to detail.
• Curious, innovative, and proactive in driving the organisation forward.
• Collaborative, empathetic team player who uplifts others.
• Strategic thinker who can balance immediate delivery with long-term architecture needs.