At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead technical strategy and design for complex, cross-platform initiatives in a dynamic environment.
- Company: Join SundaySky, a forward-thinking company revolutionising video technology.
- Benefits: Enjoy competitive salary, flexible work options, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Other info: Collaborative culture focused on innovation and continuous improvement.
- Why this job: Make a real impact by shaping the future of video creation and AI technologies.
- Qualifications: 12+ years in software development with strong leadership and full-stack expertise.
The predicted salary is between 72000 - 88000 £ per year.
We are seeking a Principal Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership across SundaySky’s product and platform. This is a senior individual-contributor role for an engineer who can turn ambiguous business and product goals into durable architecture, lead the most complex cross-platform initiatives, and materially improve how the engineering organization designs and delivers software. This person will remain close to the code while setting direction across video creation, personalization, rendering, data, AI, distribution, and the shared platform capabilities that support them.
Key Responsibilities:
- Define and evolve the technical architecture for SundaySky’s multi-tenant SaaS platform across frontend applications, backend services, data systems, media pipelines, integrations, and cloud infrastructure.
- Lead the technical strategy and design for the company’s highest-risk, most ambiguous, and most cross-cutting product and platform initiatives.
- Translate business strategy, product requirements, and customer needs into scalable technical capabilities, sequenced investments, and executable implementation plans.
- Serve as a hands-on technical leader by prototyping critical paths, contributing production code, reviewing high-impact changes, and resolving the hardest engineering problems.
- Establish clear architectural principles, service boundaries, integration patterns, data contracts, and decision records that enable teams to move quickly without creating unnecessary complexity.
- Drive modernization of established platform components while preserving business continuity and the delivery of new customer value.
- Identify and address systemic risks involving scalability, performance, reliability, availability, security, privacy, operability, and maintainability.
- Guide the architecture of video creation, real-time and batch rendering, personalization, animation, media processing, asset management, analytics, and distribution capabilities.
- Shape the responsible use of generative AI, large language models, synthetic media, and AI-assisted engineering tools across the product and development lifecycle.
- Partner with Product and UX to evaluate solution options, expose constraints early, and balance customer value, delivery speed, platform leverage, and long-term technical health.
- Partner with Engineering leadership, DevOps, QA, and Security to improve system design, delivery practices, production readiness, and operational resilience.
- Lead technical discovery, architecture reviews, design reviews, and cross-team alignment for major initiatives.
- Create leverage through shared frameworks, reusable components, platform services, automation, developer tooling, and well-defined engineering standards.
- Raise the quality of technical decision-making through rigorous code reviews, design feedback, mentoring, pairing, and clear written communication.
- Coach senior and mid-level engineers, develop emerging technical leaders, and help teams independently make sound architectural decisions.
- Improve observability, capacity planning, incident response, root-cause analysis, and the elimination of recurring production issues.
- Evaluate new technologies and external platforms through focused experimentation, evidence-based tradeoffs, and clear adoption recommendations.
- Communicate technical strategy, architectural decisions, risks, and tradeoffs effectively to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders.
The ideal candidate combines deep full-stack and distributed-systems expertise with pragmatic judgment, strong product thinking, and the ability to influence through technical credibility.
Qualifications:
- Experience designing enterprise integrations involving third-party APIs, identity providers, data platforms, webhooks, file exchange, and event-based interfaces.
- Deep expertise in distributed systems, service architecture, APIs, asynchronous workflows, event-driven patterns, background processing, and failure handling.
- Experience establishing CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, automated testing, observability, and production-operability practices for distributed applications.
- Expert full-stack engineering capability, with deep experience in modern JavaScript and TypeScript and strong proficiency in at least one backend technology such as Node.js, Python, Java, or C#.
- Experience designing for scalability, resilience, high availability, graceful degradation, disaster recovery, and measurable service-level objectives.
- Deep understanding of cloud-native architecture, preferably AWS, including containers, serverless services, networking, storage, compute, deployment patterns, and cost management.
- Demonstrated ability to lead architecture and implementation across multiple teams without relying on formal reporting authority.
- Strong knowledge of application and platform security, authentication, authorization, tenant isolation, secrets management, data protection, privacy, and secure software development.
- Demonstrated ability to modernize a mature platform incrementally while continuing to deliver product capabilities and protect customer commitments.
- Strong experience with relational and non-relational data architecture, schema design, data integrity, migration strategies, and performance optimization.
- Approximately 12 or more years of professional software development experience, including significant technical leadership in production SaaS environments.
- A sustained record of designing, building, and operating complex, business-critical software platforms at scale.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical decisions, tradeoffs, and risks to varied audiences.
- Advanced experience with modern frontend architecture, preferably React, including component systems, state management, performance, accessibility, browser behavior, and complex workflow-oriented applications.
- Experience with AWS or another major cloud provider.
- Experience working on a multi-tenant SaaS platform.
- Demonstrate accountability for the health, evolution, and business impact of the platform as a whole.
- Personally solve the highest-leverage technical problems while enabling others to execute the broader solution.
- Build alignment across teams, resolve technical disagreements constructively, and influence decisions through evidence and credibility.
- Set coherent technical direction across multiple products, teams, and planning horizons.
A successful Principal Engineer should be able to:
- Recognise systemic risks and architectural constraints before they become delivery or production failures.
- Raise engineering quality and delivery confidence without becoming a bottleneck or centralising every decision.
- Make consequential technical decisions with incomplete information and clearly articulate the assumptions and tradeoffs involved.
- Balance immediate business needs with scalability, reliability, security, maintainability, and long-term platform evolution.
- Convert ambiguous strategic goals into clear architecture, technical milestones, ownership boundaries, and delivery paths.
- Create durable organisational leverage through platforms, standards, tools, documentation, and stronger technical leaders.
- Experience with video, audio, media processing, creative tooling, animation, rendering, transcoding, or digital asset management.
- Experience with browser-based motion graphics using React, JavaScript, CSS animations, Canvas, WebGL, WebAssembly, or related technologies.
- Experience with generative AI, large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic workflows, prompt orchestration, or AI-generated media.
- Experience architecting configurable enterprise platforms and internal developer platforms with reusable services, fine-grained permissions, approval workflows, auditability, and governance controls.
- Experience with high-throughput job orchestration, message queues, event buses, streaming systems, or distributed rendering workloads.
- Experience with enterprise data connectivity, CRM or customer-data platforms, personalised content systems, or customers in regulated industries such as banking, financial services, and insurance.
- Experience with PostgreSQL.
- Experience with automated browser testing frameworks.
- Experience with event-driven systems, background jobs, message queues, or asynchronous processing.
- Experience integrating third-party applications or services.
- Experience in an Agile or iterative product-development environment.
Principal Engineer employer: SundaySky
At SundaySky, we pride ourselves on being an exceptional employer that fosters a culture of innovation and collaboration. As a Principal Engineer, you will not only lead cutting-edge technical initiatives but also have access to continuous professional development opportunities in a dynamic environment that values your contributions. Our commitment to employee growth, coupled with our focus on modern technologies and a supportive team atmosphere, makes SundaySky an ideal place for those seeking meaningful and rewarding careers in the tech industry.
StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫
We think this is how you could land Principal Engineer
✨Join Local Tech Meetups
Get out there and mingle with fellow developers by joining local tech meetups. It’s a fantastic way to meet people who might be working at SundaySky or know someone who does. Plus, you can pick up some trendy tech skills and trends while you're at it!
✨Contribute to Open Source Projects
Show off your coding chops by jumping into open-source projects. Not only does this give you practical experience, but it also gets you noticed in the dev community. You'll create a killer portfolio that speaks volumes about your skills to SundaySky.
✨Tap into Online Developer Communities
Don’t underestimate the power of online developer communities like GitHub, Stack Overflow, and even Reddit. Participate in discussions, share your projects, and build your visibility. We can often find opportunities through these channels that can lead to a full-time gig at companies like SundaySky.
✨Explore Job Boards Specifically for Tech Roles
Keep your eyes peeled on job boards that focus on tech roles. Sites like TechCareers or Stack Overflow Jobs can often have listings for companies like SundaySky that might not show up on broader job sites. Make it a habit to check these regularly, and don’t hesitate to apply directly through our website!
We think you need these skills to ace Principal Engineer
Some tips for your application 🫡
Show off your coding skills:When applying for a software engineering role, it's super important to showcase your coding skills. Make sure your CV includes your tech stack, any relevant programming languages you’re comfortable with, and examples of projects you've worked on. If you have a GitHub profile, link it up! We love to see code in action.
Tailor your portfolio:For a full-time role, we’d expect to see some solid examples of your work in your portfolio. Make sure to include at least two or three projects that highlight your problem-solving skills and your ability to work with different technologies. Focus on the projects that are most relevant to the position at SundaySky.
Craft a killer cover letter:Your cover letter is your chance to stand out—make it personal! Explain why you want to work at SundaySky and how your skills align with the role. Show us your passion for software development. We dig enthusiastic candidates who understand the value of collaboration and continuous learning!
Be clear and concise:When it comes to writing your CV and cover letter, clarity is key. Avoid jargon that could confuse us and stick to simple, direct language. Highlight your achievements with quantifiable results where possible, and keep everything easy to read. A well-organised application goes a long way!
How to prepare for a job interview at SundaySky
✨Brush Up on Your Coding Skills
For a full-time software engineering role, it's crucial that we stay sharp with our coding abilities. Expect technical questions that might involve solving problems on the spot or discussing algorithms. Practise on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to get comfortable with the types of questions that often come up.
✨Know Your Tools and Frameworks
Make sure we’re well-acquainted with the tools and technologies listed in the job description. Familiarise ourselves with any specific frameworks or programming languages mentioned. If SundaySky uses React or Node.js, for instance, be ready to discuss how we’ve used them in previous projects or coursework.
✨Showcase Your Projects
Bring along a portfolio that highlights our best work. This could be code samples, GitHub repositories, or any side projects we’ve built. Make sure we can talk through our thought process for each project, especially the challenges we faced and how we solved them—this shows our problem-solving skills in action.
✨Prepare for Behavioural Questions
While technical skills are key, full-time positions also require cultural fit. Be ready to discuss our previous experiences and how we handle teamwork, conflict, and deadlines. Brush up on the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to clearly articulate our past experiences when discussing how we've contributed to a team.
