Principal Engineer

Location: Edinburgh – Hybrid working model

SnapDragon is a technology-enabled online brand protection business serving global brands, law firms and IP professionals. We combine proprietary AI-driven detection software with a highly trained, multilingual team of analysts to identify, evidence and remove digital infringements at scale. Value to SnapDragon’s global clients is provided through enforcing against illicit products, infringing domains and websites, fake apps, and social media site impersonators. SnapDragon defends client reputations and revenues and keeps brands and their consumers safe. We are inquisitive, tech and brand savvy, digital bodyguards.

About the Role

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to join our growing engineering team. This is a high-impact role for someone who thrives in a fast-moving environment, takes genuine ownership of the systems they build, and cares deeply about code quality, reliability, and the people around them. You will work across the full stack of our backend platform, from product features with complex business logic to the infrastructure and data pipelines that underpin them. You’ll be a key voice in technical decisions, a mentor to less experienced engineers, and a direct contributor to raising the bar across the team. We’re a small, ambitious team and this is a hands-on role. You’ll be expected to contribute directly to the codebase while also shaping the technical direction of the platform. If you’re looking to move away from building, this isn’t the right fit.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and maintain robust backend services and APIs that serve real business-critical needs.
• Own significant parts of our platform end-to-end, from database schema to deployment pipeline.
• Work closely with stakeholders across the business, translating complex technical concepts into clear, actionable communication.
• Contribute to infrastructure design and maintenance using infrastructure-as-code tooling.
• Help define and uphold engineering standards: code review, testing practices, documentation, and beyond.
• Mentor engineers across the team, sharing knowledge and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
• Participate actively in agile ceremonies, sprint planning, and iterative delivery.

About You

You’re an experienced engineer with:

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of delivering production systems at scale.
• Strong proficiency in a dynamic programming language such as Ruby, Python, or similar, and deep familiarity with a major web framework (Ruby on Rails, Django, or equivalent).
• Expert-level SQL skills, with particular depth in PostgreSQL, including schema design, query optimisation, and an understanding of what happens under the hood.
• Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL database administration and management. You’re comfortable owning a database, not just querying it.
• Experience with infrastructure as code. We use Terraform and Terragrunt, and we expect you to be comfortable reading, writing, and reviewing infrastructure definitions alongside application code.
• A proven track record building and maintaining APIs and web applications that involve non-trivial, real-world business logic.
• Testing is a natural part of how you work, not an afterthought. You write tests as you build, and you advocate for testable design.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and the practices that make continuous delivery safe and reliable.
• Familiarity with asynchronous messaging systems. You understand the landscape, have worked with at least one in production, and can reason clearly about the trade-offs between different approaches.
• Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to the development of engineering culture and standards.

Desirable / Stand Out

• Experience working with data lakes or large-scale data platforms.
• Exposure to machine learning systems, whether building, integrating, or maintaining ML pipelines in production.
• Experience with container orchestration: Kubernetes, ECS, or similar cluster management tooling.

Location

Our engineering team is based in Edinburgh, and we’d love you to be part of that in person where possible. That said, we’re open to fully remote candidates within the UK for the right person, with the expectation of periodic visits to Edinburgh for team time, planning, and collaboration. You must have the right to work in the UK. We are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role.

Why SnapDragon?

You’ll join a friendly, international team based in the centre of Edinburgh with colleagues from France, Japan, Romania, South Korea and beyond – a group known for being supportive, welcoming, and ambitious. SnapDragon is growing and this role presents great opportunities for progression and skill development. We are an equal opportunities employer and welcome applications from all backgrounds.