Principal Engineer - Software & Systems Integration
Hybrid
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.
The role
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.
Specifically:
- 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.
