Principle Developer

Group Technology Principal Developer

Full-time · Stockport office every Thursday; remote the rest of the week · Salary dependent on experience

About Naturecan

Naturecan Group is a fast-growing, multi-entity health and wellness business operating across e-commerce, regulated pharmacy, and clinical healthcare. We run operations across the UK, Germany, and beyond — brands include Naturecan (D2C, ~50 Shopify stores), Mycannabis and Nowomed (German medical cannabis pharmacy), WMG Pharma (wholesale pharmaceutical distribution), and Dose (our CQC-registered UK medical cannabis clinic, in development). Group net sales continue to grow across Naturecan Core, MedCan pharmacy, WMG wholesale, and Dose all scaling simultaneously. The technology team sits at the heart of that growth: we build and maintain the platforms that underpin every entity in the group.

The Role

This is a group-level principal technical role. You will report directly to the IT Director with a remit that spans infrastructure ownership, cross-team technical collaboration, and the ability to float across streams and pick up whatever is most critical at any given point. The nature of the role is breadth and depth in equal measure. One day you may be deep in a server performance issue for the MedCan WordPress estate; the next you are reviewing Dose’s payment gateway architecture or driving the security remediation programme. Context switching at pace — without losing technical rigour — is fundamental to how this role operates.

In practice, the role has two dimensions:

• Technical ownership. — owning the group’s infrastructure, security governance, DNS, AI strategy, and platform-level decisions that require principal-level experience. This includes driving improvements to internal tooling and communications infrastructure — ensuring the business operates on the right foundations as it scales.
• Cross-team technical collaboration. — supporting the Engineering Manager and delivery teams as a senior technical resource — available to dig into hard architectural or infrastructure problems and provide technical continuity across delivery streams when needed.

At the outset this is an individual contributor role with no people reporting line — influence through technical depth and judgement rather than hierarchy. That said, this role is not rigidly defined. We are looking for the right person first, and if that person brings people leadership as an additional strength, there is a natural opportunity for the role to evolve in that direction as the team grows. What matters most is exceptional technical ability and the drive to use it.

As an e-commerce and healthcare business, our platforms run 24/7. Occasionally that means responding to something outside of normal hours — this is part of the role and expected on those rare occasions when it’s needed. We are flexible in return: if you’ve been working late resolving a critical issue, you are not expected to be online first thing the following morning. The goal of this role is also to put the right guardrails in place so that those situations become increasingly rare.

What You’ll Own

• Infrastructure implementation oversight and security review
• Dose — Technical Oversight
• Payment gateway integration — senior technical oversight and review, working closely with the Dose team and Engineering Manager
• Architecture review on complex Dose decisions — regulatory data handling, CQC compliance, patient data security
• DevOps support for the Dose platform — CI/CD, environment management, deployment pipeline stability
• Cross‑platform technical decisions, particularly where the Nowomed‑to‑Dose migration path intersects with MedCan infrastructure
• AI Automation able to reprioritise without losing momentum on either
• Operates autonomously and works at pace — picks up complex problems, drives them to resolution, and communicates clearly throughout
• Comfortable as a senior technical contributor without a people reporting line — influence through depth, not hierarchy
• Strong written communication — able to translate complex technical situations into clear, concise summaries for non‑technical stakeholders
• Reliable under pressure — shows up on incidents, traces root causes quickly, and communicates clearly while doing it
• Comfortable with the realities of e‑commerce and regulated healthcare — platforms run around the clock, and occasionally so do the people who build them

About the Team

The engineering team is small, direct, and high‑trust. The Engineering Manager leads delivery across Dose and MedCan. The Dose team is a mix of FTE and senior contractors focused on the clinical platform. MedCan has a core senior developer and a growing clinic operation. Naturecan Core has two developers supporting ~50 Shopify stores. You will report to the IT Director, work closely with the Engineering Manager, and have direct visibility into every significant technical decision across the group. You won't be operating in isolation — the IT Director works alongside you on the areas that need it, and the wider team is collaborative and high‑trust.

This role is new. It was created to meet a structural need for a principal‑level technical authority that can operate across every part of the group — picking up senior technical workstreams, supporting delivery teams, and building the technical foundation for a business scaling toward £150m in net sales. You will be building the function, not inheriting it.

What We Offer

• Salary – Depending on experience
• Location – Stockport office every Thursday; remote the rest of the week
• Pension – Company pension scheme
• Health – Private health insurance
• Staff discount – Naturecan group product discount
• AI Tooling – Claude Enterprise access — AI‑assisted development workflows embedded in how we work
• Culture – Small team, big ambition — genuine ownership and direct access to decision‑makers
• Process – Two‑week sprints, retrospectives, pair working practices
• Flexibility – We trust you to manage your time — if you’ve been working late on an incident, you are not expected in early the next morning
• Equity – Meaningful equity conversation for the right candidate
• Growth – Opportunity to build a team as the business scales

Interview Process

• Initial call (30 mins) — role overview and mutual fit
• Technical review (1 hour) — architecture, system design, prior work walkthrough
• Team meet — working practices, Q&A