Principal Software Engineer in England

At MHR, our employees are central to our success and play a key role in helping customers achieve sustainable high performance. With a team of over professionals, we work to make things flow smoothly, whether it's for large organisations or individual employees. As businesses face rapid changes in the world of work, our team is here to help them adapt and thrive. By focusing on the core needs of efficiency, productivity, growth, and impact, our employees use their expertise to deliver real solutions through our People and Finance platform.

This system, which covers finance, HR, payroll, and learning, helps businesses run more smoothly and make better decisions in real time. With over 40 years of experience behind us, MHR's track record as a high-performance organisation is built on clear goals, a shared vision, and strong communication - all of which we pass on to our customers. MHR is more than just a place to work; it's a platform for empowerment.

Joining us means bringing innovation, technology, and teamwork seamlessly removes obstacles, enhances your skills, and allows you to focus on what's most important to you - work that matters. With us, you'll grow, find your flow, and make a lasting difference in your career, your team, and your impact.

Are you ready to shape the future of technology and be at the forefront of innovation? Join our dynamic team as a Principal Software Engineer, where you'll design, develop, and maintain scalable software solutions in a collaborative and creative environment. This is your chance to work with cutting-edge technology, grow your skills, and drive impactful innovation.

You’ll be joining the App Platform team who are committed to delivering quality, scalable, and maintainable software. Acting as the bridge between architecture and production teams, you’ll foster a culture of cooperation, learning, and continual improvement. By identifying challenges and implementing solutions, you’ll help your team thrive in an agile environment, where everyone contributes to achieving our ambitious product roadmaps.

We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer who thrives on making systems faster, more scalable, and more reliable. In this role you will provide high quality and effective product development, drive technical change, review the existing code base and ensure that everyone is following the same technical direction.

In this role you will:

• Provide technical leadership through deep hands-on engineering, solving complex, system-level challenges and shaping the evolution of the People First platform.
• Lead architectural direction in partnership with engineering leadership and architects, driving design decisions, ensuring technical alignment, and steering high-impact engineering initiatives.
• Drive codebase excellence by identifying structural improvements, reducing complexity, and embedding robust engineering standards across multiple teams and services.
• Amplify team capability through mentorship, resolving high-severity technical issues, sharing research and emerging technology insights, and contributing to senior-level hiring and talent decisions.

Tech you will be using:

• C#, .NET 10, ASP.NET Core
• Microsoft Azure (Functions, AKS, App Service, API Management, Service Bus, Event Grid, Storage, Cosmos DB, Azure SQL)
• Azure DevOps, Git, CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Bicep
• Microservices, event-driven architecture, DDD

What you’ll bring to the role and MHR:

• Deep backend expertise in C#/.NET and distributed systems. As a bonus some Angular knowledge would be beneficial.
• Proven track record improving performance at scale (profiling tools, load testing, tuning).
• Experience redesigning complex systems and cloud-native architectures.
• Hands-on Azure design and production operations.
• Pragmatic leadership: able to coach, influence, and align cross-functional teams.
• A data-informed approach: define and move SLIs/SLOs; automate measurement.

Benefits to support you personally and professionally:

Alongside the opportunity to work with an incredible team and express your individuality, we offer a range of personalised benefits including:

• Access to over 60 internal training courses, professional qualifications, and cross-departmental mentoring and coaching programs.
• 24/7 access to a GP through Help at Hand for you and your family, confidential mental health support, and paid sick leave.
• Ability to purchase or sell additional holiday days beyond 25 days.