Principal Engineer

Principal Engineer

Full-Time 80000 - 100000 Β£ / year (est.) No working from home possible
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At a Glance

  • Tasks: Lead software engineering, shape technical direction, and tackle complex integration challenges.
  • Company: Fast-growing UK tech company with a focus on real-world platforms.
  • Benefits: Competitive salary, flexible working, and opportunities for professional growth.
  • Other info: Dynamic role with hands-on involvement and excellent career advancement potential.
  • Why this job: Make a real impact by solving complex problems at the intersection of software and hardware.
  • Qualifications: Strong software engineering background and experience with distributed systems.

The predicted salary is between 80000 - 100000 Β£ per year.

A fast-growing UK technology company is looking for a senior software engineering leader to take ownership of the software function and help shape the technical direction of a genuinely complex, real-world platform. The business operates in a demanding, high-stakes environment. The product is live, the customers are real, and the engineering challenges are interesting. This is not a role managing a CRUD application; the platform sits on top of a sophisticated sensor hardware stack and processes, fuses, and acts on data from those systems in real time. The person in this role needs to be as comfortable at the boundary between hardware and software as they are inside the codebase.

You will lead the software engineering function, reporting directly to the CTO. You will sit alongside a Data Science Manager and Head of Software Engineering. This is a player-coach position. You will be expected to be present in the work, involved in technical decisions, design reviews, complex integrations, and difficult debugging, not managing from a distance. The team needs someone with genuine hands-on credibility across both software engineering and system-level integration, not just delivery oversight.

What the work involves:

  • Owning technical direction and engineering standards across the software function
  • Hands-on involvement in architecture decisions, design reviews, and integration challenges across a distributed services platform
  • Working across our core stack including distributed services and RabbitMQ-based messaging
  • Owning the software-to-hardware integration layer, understanding how sensor data enters the platform, how it is processed, and where the boundaries and failure modes lie
  • Driving the maturation agenda: security posture, observability, scalability, and engineering process rigour
  • Building and developing a high-performing software engineering team
  • Engaging directly with customers and partners on technical integration and deployment challenges

What we're looking for:

  • You are a software engineer first. You have built and led engineering teams, but you have never fully left the technical work behind. You still care about the code, the architecture, and getting things right at the level of implementation.
  • Critically, you are comfortable operating at the interface between software and complex physical systems, you understand how hardware and software interact, and you can engage credibly with both worlds.
  • A strong software engineering background with meaningful experience in distributed systems and event-driven architectures
  • Fluency across modern software engineering tooling and patterns, you keep your currency current
  • Experience working with sensor-integrated systems or hardware-software interfaces, you understand how data flows from a physical sensor into a software platform and what can go wrong along the way
  • Comfort working across or alongside data science and ML pipelines, you don't need to be a data scientist, but you can engage at a technical level and hold the team to engineering standards
  • Experience leading and building software engineering teams: hiring, mentoring, setting direction, owning delivery
  • The instinct and confidence to make pragmatic architectural decisions in a fast-moving product environment
  • Clear, direct communication: comfortable presenting to executive leadership and engaging customers on complex technical matters

Why this role:

The platform is genuinely complex and the problems are not generic. You will be working at the intersection of software engineering, sensor data, and real-time processing in an environment where the output actually matters.

Principal Engineer employer: Technify Talent

Join a fast-growing UK technology company that values innovation and technical excellence, offering a dynamic work culture where your contributions directly impact real-world applications. With a focus on employee growth, you will have the opportunity to lead a high-performing team while engaging in hands-on technical challenges at the forefront of software and systems integration. Enjoy a collaborative environment that encourages direct communication with customers and partners, ensuring your work is both meaningful and rewarding.

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Contact Details:

Technify Talent Recruitment Team

We think you need these skills to ace Principal Engineer

Software Engineering
Systems Integration
Distributed Systems
Event-Driven Architectures
Sensor-Integrated Systems
Hardware-Software Interfaces
Real-Time Processing