Principal Software Engineer (Cloud), Retail Solutions in Newcastle upon Tyne

Oliver Wyman is seeking a Principal Software Engineer (Cloud) to join our Retail Solutions team in the UK, with London or Newcastle being our preferred office locations but we can offer some flexibility. Retail Solutions is a new kind of team within Oliver Wyman: an internal product startup that blends a strong engineering culture and an obsession for creating products that deliver the world’s biggest retail impact. Our suite of retail tools empowers merchandising teams to address complex analytical challenges and make the most important commercial decisions at the heart of every retailer: optimizing assortments, promotional programs, and pricing strategies.

About the role: The Retail Solutions engineering teams build and operate our SaaS products, enabled by our cloud Platform. The combination of our Platform together with common services, patterns and approaches, unlocks our ability to innovate and build new products and functionality, ultimately increasing our value proposition. We are looking for an experienced Engineer to join the Application-Enablement team, serving as the bridge between our SaaS product engineering and our Platform teams. This team leads some of our most innovative and cutting‑edge work such as the extraction of new common services and/or the creation of new products. This is a hands‑on role that requires a strong software engineering and cloud engineering foundation. The role will also require solid collaboration and leadership skills. You will collaborate with our product teams as well as our Platform team, facilitating the work on initiatives that involve multiple of these teams. And since the Application-Enablement team will often spearhead the adoption of new patterns, strategies and platform functionality, you will also have the leadership and organizational skills to see these adopted across our Engineering teams. You will be comfortable working with Retail’s leadership to develop and understand the organizational goals and priorities. You will feed these into the roadmap of the application-enablement team, balancing short‑term impact and long‑term vision.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and operation of new services and functionality added to our SaaS offering.
• Facilitate knowledge sharing and cross‑team collaboration across the Engineering organization, maximizing the impact of the application‑enablement team initiatives.
• Drive the roadmap of the application‑enablement team, in collaboration with Retail leadership and engineering teams, balancing short‑term impact with long‑term vision.
• Champion best practices in cloud architectures such as 12‑factor apps, observability, and others, to meet high availability, performance, security, and cost efficiency needs of our products and platform.
• Lead the adoption of solutions, patterns and strategies that improve efficiency and development experience across our Engineering organization.
• Evaluate and integrate existing or emerging cloud services and open‑source technologies to enhance our products and platform capabilities and maintain a competitive edge.
• Collaborate with security and compliance teams to embed policies and controls into our products and platform, ensuring adherence to organizational and regulatory standards.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement, mentoring and leading engineering teams to deliver high‑quality solutions and operational excellence.

Who We Are Looking For

You’ll have a solid understanding of software, cloud and platform engineering fundamentals, an ability to deliver new solutions into production and a strong desire to learn, are key to succeeding in the role, rather than perfectly matching our stack. That said, these are the most important technical skills for the role:

• 7+ years of engineering experience overall, with at least 2-3 years in a similar Principal SW Engineering or SW Architect roles.
• Our codebase uses primarily JavaScript and Python, across various web applications, backend services and analytical processes, and leverages frameworks such as Express.js, Vue, Flask or Pandas.
• This is a hands‑on role; you should be comfortable writing code and building solutions.
• Experience designing and building distributed applications and architectures.
• You will be comfortable with different architectural styles and with concepts such as DDD, service‑mesh or data‑mesh.
• Experience building, deploying and operating applications in Kubernetes - we use AKS with a supporting range of tools like argoCD, argo-workflows, helm, Dapr, and more.
• Familiarity with DevSecOps, Infrastructure as Code and GitOps patterns in order to manage cloud infrastructure. Ideally, you are familiar with Terraform.
• Familiarity with database engines such as MongoDB or PostgreSQL.
• Familiarity with large data and data warehouses/lakehouses, ideally with Databricks.
• Familiarity with FinOps concepts and processes.
• A strong understanding of software engineering best practices such as version control, CI/CD, automated testing, observability, and security.
• Relevant certifications such as Azure’s Solutions Architect or Kubernetes’ CKA are a bonus but not required.

Why Join Us

Our team is distributed over several countries, with a center of gravity in the UK and Spain. We believe that by mixing our diverse backgrounds and experiences with the ingredients below, we have a recipe for building great software.

• Culture: We are large enough to organize ourselves around a line of four products, but small enough that we all know each other well. We are all team players first and foremost and that results in a strong and inclusive team culture. We are in this team because we love learning and improving how we do things, we love building stuff.
• Impact: Our team is growing fast to deliver on ambitious plans to bring our product suite to the largest retailers on the planet in collaboration with Oliver Wyman’s Consumer, Technology and Telecoms (CTT) practice. This is an opportunity to do something different than almost anywhere else: work in multi-disciplinary teams to build great products, and at the same time see up close the real-world impact you create.
• Ownership: You will get the autonomy, trust, and support to make decisions, take on responsibility, and drive our experience forward.
• Flat structure: Decision‑making is as transparent as we know how to make it. We don’t always get it right, but we get better every day. We do have different levels of experience and responsibility but in the day‑to‑day we all want to experience a flat structure without unnecessary hierarchy: a strong rationale beats arguments from authority every time.

Oliver Wyman is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.