Principal Engineer (AWS & Java) in Nottingham

Requirements

• Extensive experience as a Principal Engineer, or equivalent senior technical role on large-scale, production systems
• Deep, hands-on expertise in Java (Java 11+ preferred), including JVM behaviour, concurrency, and performance optimisation
• Strong, practical experience building and running systems on AWS, with a focus on real-world operational trade-offs
• Proven ability to implement and operate distributed systems at scale, with particular emphasis on performance and scalability
• Strong experience working with large databases or data platforms, including performance tuning and operational management
• Strong understanding of production operations, including incident management, observability, and reliability engineering
• Ability to influence and guide teams through technical credibility rather than formal authority

What the job involves

• Act as the most senior hands-on technical expert for our leading Risk Screening platform
• Partner closely with architecture, service, product, and engineering teams to ensure that agreed designs are implemented to the highest technical and operational standards
• Ownership of the system’s non-functional characteristics, including end-to-end latency, cloud scalability, resilience, and the effective handling of large and growing data sets
• Ensure these qualities are deliberately designed for, correctly implemented, and continuously validated in production
• Translate architectural intent into robust, performant, and secure production systems
• Tackle the hardest technical challenges, proactively identify operational risks, and provide deep technical guidance
• Act as the senior-most technical authority for implementation within the Risk Screening platform
• Work in close partnership with enterprise and solution architects to validate designs, challenge assumptions, and guide effective development approaches
• Lead the implementation of the most complex and business-critical changes, setting the standard for quality, performance, and maintainability
• Provide hands-on expertise in Java-based systems, including concurrency, performance tuning, memory management, and API design
• Define, implement, and validate non-functional requirements, including system latency, throughput, scalability, and reliability
• Drive solutions for cloud scaling and capacity management
• Provide deep expertise in working with large databases and data stores
• Solve complex and ambiguous technical problems
• Act as a point of escalation for deep technical issues
• Support engineering teams in making sound technical decisions
• Serve as a deep AWS expert, guiding teams on best-practice use of AWS services
• Ensure implementations support horizontal and vertical scaling, efficient resource utilisation, and predictable behaviour as demand grows
• Guide and review approaches to autoscaling and workload management
• Review cloud implementations to confirm they meet expectations for availability, scalability, cost-efficiency, and compliance
• Proactively identify operational risks, scaling limits, and reliability concerns
• Drive improvements in resilience, monitoring, alerting, and incident prevention
• Partner with Site Reliability Engineers, platform, and operations teams to improve system operability
• Champion engineering standards across coding, testing, deployment, and operational readiness
• Conduct deep technical reviews of critical changes
• Help teams reduce technical debt through pragmatic, incremental improvements
• Act as a technical mentor and coach to senior engineers and technical leads
• Support engineers in developing stronger implementation skills and deeper system-level thinking
• Influence engineering culture through example, constructive challenge, and a focus on practical excellence