Great opportunity for a Principal Engineer to join a software consultancy at the forefront of AI-native software engineering. The company employs around 500 people, works with a mix of large enterprises and fast‑growing scale‑ups, and their engineers are already using agents to deliver quality work for clients at a pace that wasn’t possible until now. As a Principal Engineer, you’ll be the go‑to technical expert on client projects and will be responsible for architecture, technical direction and raising the level of the engineers around you. You’ll be dealing with stakeholders up to CTO and CEO level, so you’ll need the commercial awareness to frame technical decisions in business terms and the confidence to call out when a problem isn’t a technical one. AI is a core part of the role rather than a side skill – you’ll set AI up to succeed and treat context engineering as a craft (the right files, specs, examples and constraints), pick the right tools for the job and mentor the team in AI fluency. The culture is pragmatic and delivery focused; they value outcomes over output, build the smallest thing that works and then iterate. Skills Distributed systems Cloud (cost and security aware) and IaC Data pipelines, vector stores and embeddings AI assisted engineering (Claude Code, agents, evals) Consulting and stakeholder management You should be tech agnostic and expect to work with a variety of modern tech including Java, Node, .NET, Python, AWS, Azure, GCP etc. The money is good too – up to £160k plus benefits including remote first working with occasional time onsite with clients to build relationships in person. #J-18808-Ljbffr
Principal Engineer (£160k + benefits) employer: Manchester Digital
Join a dynamic SaaS company in Wigan as a Lead Software Engineer, where you'll thrive in a collaborative and innovative work culture that values your expertise and contributions. With competitive compensation of up to £80k plus benefits like a 5% matched pension, share options, and private healthcare, you’ll have the resources to grow both personally and professionally while enjoying the flexibility of hybrid working. This is an exciting opportunity to take ownership of system design and implementation in a supportive environment that encourages modern engineering practices.
