Principal Engineer (SC Cleared)

Overview

AI & Data Experts – Senior Delivery Consultant – Job Title: Principal Engineer (SC Cleared). Day Rate: Up to £545 a day inside IR35. Clearance: SC Clearance required. On Call: Required as part of a 24/7 L3 support rota. Contract Length: 12 months (with scope to extend).

The Principal Engineer will operate as a senior technical leader within a public sector digital programme, responsible for guiding multiple engineering teams delivering business-critical services. The role combines hands-on technical leadership, architectural oversight, and mentoring, while working closely with senior stakeholders to ensure high-quality, secure, and compliant delivery.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor multiple engineering teams, promoting best practices and continuous improvement
• Provide technical leadership across complex systems and architectures
• Engage with stakeholders across business and technology to align delivery outcomes
• Own and assure technical decisions, including risk mitigation and compliance
• Support backlog refinement, user story preparation, and sprint planning
• Oversee development, testing, and deployment of high-availability services
• Support incident, change, service request, and problem management processes
• Participate in on-call L3 support for live services

Essential Skills and Experience

• Demonstrable leadership of multiple engineering teams
• Strong stakeholder engagement and communication skills
• Object-oriented analysis and design expertise
• In-depth experience with a fourth-generation programming language
• Proven mentoring and coaching capability

Desirable Skills and Experience

• Strong backend development experience with Java or C#
• Spring Boot, REST APIs, microservices architecture
• AWS cloud services and DevOps practices
• Strong testing discipline including TDD, unit, integration, and end-to-end testing
• Relational databases, ideally PostgreSQL
• Experience supporting live services in a 24/7 operational environment

Additional Information

• Systems operate continuously and require on-call participation
• Role operates within established public sector delivery and governance frameworks

Seniority level

• Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Contract

Job function

• Information Technology

Industries

• Information Services