Principal Engineer-Retail Lending / Digital Channels

Principal Engineer - Retail Lending / Digital Channels

Location: London or Edinburgh
Working Pattern: Hybrid - 6 days per month in the office
Salary: Competitive salary + 10% pension + 10% flexible benefits + bonus
Employment Type: Permanent

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced Principal Engineer to join a large financial services organisation and play a key role in shaping and delivering technology solutions across its digital banking environment.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you will work closely with Product Owners, Business Managers and Release Train Managers to translate business objectives and customer needs into robust, scalable technology solutions.

You will initially focus on Retail Lending and Loans, with the opportunity to contribute across wider digital products including Overdrafts and Insurance.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the technical design and delivery of complex digital solutions.
• Work closely with business and product stakeholders to understand customer and business requirements.
• Define and evolve application and solution architecture.
• Provide technical leadership to a team of engineers, initially leading approximately 3-5 engineers.
• Remain hands-on with software engineering and contribute to production delivery.
• Design and develop scalable Java and Spring Boot microservices.
• Design and deliver solutions using AWS.
• Work with relational and NoSQL databases, including PostgreSQL and MongoDB.
• Work with modern data platforms and data architecture, including Snowflake.
• Consider resilience, security, scalability, performance and operational support throughout the development lifecycle.
• Influence architectural decisions and establish strong engineering practices.
• Support the transition of capabilities from third-party providers into internal teams.
• Work across multiple product areas as the technology landscape develops.

Essential Experience

• Significant experience working as a Principal Engineer, Lead Engineer, Senior Engineer or equivalent in a complex technology environment.
• Strong hands-on Java development experience.
• Strong experience designing and delivering microservices architectures.
• Hands-on AWS experience is essential.
• Experience designing scalable, highly available and resilient cloud-based solutions.
• Strong understanding of APIs, distributed systems and integration patterns.
• Experience with Spring Boot.
• Experience with PostgreSQL and/or MongoDB.
• Strong understanding of software engineering principles, architecture and design patterns.
• Experience taking solutions through development and into production.
• Ability to provide technical leadership and influence engineering decisions.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to engage effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Desirable Experience

• Financial services or banking experience.
• Experience within a large, complex or regulated organisation.
• Experience with AWS migration programmes.
• Experience with Snowflake or modern data platforms.
• Experience across digital customer journeys.
• Experience leading engineers within a matrix environment.
• Experience working across lending, payments, insurance or other customer-facing financial products.

What We're Looking For

This role would suit someone who combines strong engineering depth with architectural judgement.

You should be comfortable getting into the detail when required, while also being able to step back and consider the wider customer, business and technology implications of your decisions.

You will need to be able to explain complex technical concepts clearly, challenge existing approaches constructively and influence stakeholders at different levels.

Why Consider This Opportunity?

• Work on high-profile digital banking products used by a large customer base.
• Opportunity to influence architecture and engineering direction.
• hands-on technical leadership rather than a purely managerial position.
• Exposure to multiple areas of digital financial services.
• Opportunity to work on complex cloud, microservices and digital transformation initiatives.
• Hybrid working with 6 days per month in the office.
• Competitive salary and benefits package.

Interested?

If you are an experienced Principal Engineer / Lead Engineer with strong Java, microservices and AWS experience and are looking for your next technical leadership opportunity, we'd like to hear from you.

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