Principal Software Engineer - 6 months contract

At Medtronic you can begin a life-long career of exploration and innovation, while helping champion healthcare access and equity for all. You’ll lead with purpose, breaking down barriers to innovation in a more connected, compassionate world.

Medtronic Digital Technologies is creating ambitious new products that bring connectivity, real-time guidance, and decision support to the operating room. To support this mission, we are developing compact, high-performance, embedded systems that enable edge computing and connectivity. Working closely with other teams across Medtronic, we are creating a connected ecosystem and leveraging the state of the art in computer vision to provide the most comprehensive view of surgery. If you’re interested in using cutting-edge technology to improve the standard of care in surgery on a global scale, this could be the place for you.

A Day in the Life Responsibilities may include the following and other duties may be assigned:

• Lead the end-to-end technical design for complex, high-ambiguity projects.
• Partner with system engineers to transform broad goals into actionable technical requirements.
• Conduct architectural reviews, identify risks, and define mitigation strategies.
• Provide technical mentorship to team members.
• Promote high engineering standards - ensuring clarity, scalability, and maintainability in all designs.
• Collaborate across disciplines to align technical direction with business objectives.
• Write code regularly - building prototypes, implementing critical features, and contributing to the codebase while providing architectural guidance.
• Create exceptional technical documentation - capturing architectural decisions, design rationale, and system context with the clarity and depth needed for future teams to own, extend, and troubleshoot the system independently.

Required Knowledge and Experience:

• 8+ years of backend or systems engineering experience with strong Python proficiency.
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems in production, with deep understanding of architectural trade-offs involving performance, scalability, and reliability.
• Proficiency with cloud platforms (preferably AWS), databases, APIs, and modern DevOps practices.
• Strong focus on quality assurance, including testing strategies, code review practices, and system reliability.
• Proven ability to take full ownership of complex technical projects from design through production, including proactively identifying risks, driving solutions, and taking accountability for outcomes.
• Experience leading technical initiatives across cross-functional teams, with strong ability to communicate technical concepts to diverse audiences and facilitate productive discussions with both engineering and non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated mentorship and collaborative leadership skills, creating environments where team members feel safe to raise concerns, learn from mistakes, and grow their capabilities.
• Track record of successfully navigating ambiguity, including making progress with incomplete information, breaking down complex problems, and adapting approach as requirements evolve.
• Excellent documentation skills and experience with knowledge transfer for project handovers.
• Must be willing to commute to London 2 to 3 days per week.

Physical Job Requirements:

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by employees assigned to this position, but they are not an exhaustive list of all the required responsibilities and skills of this position.

Benefits & Compensation:

Medtronic offers a competitive Salary and flexible Benefits Package. A commitment to our employees lives at the core of our values. We recognize their contributions. They share in the success they help to create. We offer a wide range of benefits, resources, and competitive compensation plans designed to support you at every career and life stage.

Pay range: United Kingdom: 95,200.00 GBP - 142,800.00 GBP | This position is eligible for a short-term incentive called the Medtronic Incentive Plan (MIP).

About Medtronic:

We lead global healthcare technology and boldly attack the most challenging health problems facing humanity by searching out and finding solutions. Our Mission — to alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life — unites a global team of 95,000+ passionate people. We are engineers at heart— putting ambitious ideas to work to generate real solutions for real people.

We change lives. Each team member, each day, helps to improve and redefine how the world treats the most pressing health conditions, from heart disease to diabetes. Our industry leadership comes from the passion and ingenuity of our people. That’s who we are. Working alongside one another, we use science, medicine, and a profound understanding of the human body to build extraordinary technologies that can transform lives.

It is the policy of Medtronic to provide equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, Medtronic will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.