Principal Software Engineer - Web Team in England

At Raspberry Pi, we foster an environment where team members can do what they love and do it well. By joining Raspberry Pi, you’ll be adding to a lean and passionate team dedicated to democratising technology and providing affordable access to computing tools worldwide.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our Web Team, taking technical responsibility for raspberrypi.com—from the website that millions rely on to learn about, buy, and use our products, to Raspberry Pi Connect, our remote access service for Raspberry Pi devices. The team’s remit also includes Raspberry Pi ID, the Raspberry Pi Product Information Portal, Raspberry Pi Events, the Raspberry Pi Official Magazine website, the Raspberry Pi forums, and our data warehouse. This is an individual contributor role for an experienced, hands-on engineer who leads through influence: setting technical direction, raising the bar through code review, and shipping production code every week alongside the rest of the team.

Our stack is Ruby on Rails with Hotwire (Turbo and Stimulus) and Tailwind CSS, backed by PostgreSQL, with some React on our homepage and Go for Raspberry Pi Connect’s on-device software. This position is based at our office in Cambridge, UK, and is a full-time, in-office role. You’ll work with friendly, exceptionally talented colleagues who are dedicated to solving problems and producing high-quality work that helps people and businesses around the world get things done with Raspberry Pi.

The successful candidate will be:

• An experienced Ruby engineer with a track record of leading production projects
• Intimately familiar with the web platform and what it takes to build fast, accessible, and secure sites
• Energised by code review and pairing as ways to grow a team and its software
• A simplifier, finding straightforward solutions to complex problems and reducing accidental complexity
• A clear and effective communicator, able to bridge the gap between technology and the rest of the business

Key responsibilities include:

• Shape the technical direction of raspberrypi.com and Raspberry Pi Connect alongside colleagues in the Web Team, taking ownership of your own projects from architecture through to production operations
• Take a hands-on approach every day: designing, building, reviewing, and shipping features alongside the rest of the Web Team
• Maintain a high bar for technical quality, performance, accessibility, and security across our web estate
• Lead incident response for our production services, including communication, post-mortems, and follow-up actions
• Use code review and pairing to maintain quality, reduce risk, accelerate delivery, and grow the team
• Reduce accidental complexity, finding simple solutions to complex problems and making pragmatic tooling decisions that consider total cost of ownership
• Act as the voice of web engineering with stakeholders across the business, explaining technical constraints and trade-offs clearly and professionally

Requirements and skills:

Raspberry Pi values pragmatic, independent thinkers who are comfortable engaging with external customers and partners, as well as internal stakeholders at all levels of seniority. We operate in a highly collaborative work environment, and the successful candidate will have excellent interpersonal and communication skills.

In addition, candidates should have:

• Substantial experience building and operating Ruby applications in production, with a track record of leading Ruby projects from design through to production operations
• Experience scaling complex web applications, including databases, caching, background jobs, and observability
• A history of contributing through code review
• An ability to simplify complex systems and processes
• An ability to develop technical strategy, both individually and as part of a team
• A commitment to lean development practices and short feedback loops, including test-driven development, continuous delivery, feature flags, and phased roll-outs
• Strong business awareness and user empathy; someone who thinks like a product engineer rather than seeing engineering as a separate function

Further highly desirable skills and experience include:

• Experience building and operating real-time services (e.g. WebRTC, Server-Sent Events), as found in Raspberry Pi Connect
• Experience with monoliths, microservices, and everything in between
• Experience with Go or React, which we use for Raspberry Pi Connect’s on-device software and our homepage, respectively
• Involvement in open source software, whether as a maintainer or a contributor
• Familiarity with Raspberry Pi computers and the community around them

We anticipate that applicants may bring a wide range of skills and previous experience across the different elements of the role. Accordingly, there is a wide salary range of £160,000 – £190,000 for this position, with specifics to be discussed with the successful applicant.

Other benefits include:

• Employer pension contributions of 8% when the employee contributes 4% of their gross salary into the salary sacrifice scheme
• Life assurance of 4× base salary
• Income protection of 75% of base salary in the event of critical illness, commencing after 13 weeks of long-term illness or absence from work
• Generous holiday entitlement
• Private medical insurance (medical history disregarded)
• A season ticket loan scheme, Cyclescheme's cycle-to-work benefit, and an electric vehicle salary sacrifice scheme
• A pleasant workplace with facilities including a small gym, weekly on-site yoga classes, comfortable break areas, and more