Principal Software Engineer in Newcastle upon Tyne

Role: Principal Software Engineer

We are The Citation Group - a collective of businesses dedicated to supporting small and medium-sized enterprises across a range of essential services.

We know that running a business means juggling a lot.

Our mission is to ease these pressures by providing expertise, guidance, and solutions that enable business leaders to focus on what they do best.

From HR and Health & Safety to Cybersecurity, E-Learning, and ISO compliance, we've got you covered.

Citation Group has achieved strong growth through a combination of organic expansion and strategic acquisitions, continually broadening our expertise, services, and reach to create a one-stop shop that supports businesses across the UK, Canada and Australia.

Role Purpose

This is a hands-on engineering role at the heart of a significant platform transformation.

You will be a core contributor to a squad that is actively changing how it builds, owns, and delivers software, and you will have real influence over the quality and direction of that work.

We are moving from a traditional release cycle to CI/CD, shifting shared services into team-owned boundaries, and embedding AI into how the team thinks and delivers.

This is not a role where you maintain the status quo.

You will be working alongside a Tech Lead to drive those changes forward, bringing technical craft and an AI-native approach to everything you build.

The right person for this role is someone who takes genuine pride in their work, wants to grow in a team that holds itself to a high standard, and is excited by the idea of building something better rather than just keeping things running.

Key Responsibilities

• Hands-on Delivery
• Write production-quality code every day across the full stack, covering backend, front-end, and the infrastructure that supports it.
• Take ownership of features and workstreams from design through to deployment, delivering working software in shippable increments.
• Contribute to technical design and architecture discussions, bringing well-reasoned input and a practical perspective.
• Run technical spikes and proofs-of-concept to explore approaches and reduce uncertainty before committing to a direction.
• Manage your own technical debt responsibly, keeping the codebase in a state you are proud of.
• Platform Transformation
• Play an active part in the decomposition of shared services into team-owned components, taking on defined pieces of that work and delivering them with care.
• Support the move to CI/CD by contributing to pipeline work, writing automated tests, and adopting trunk-based development as the default way of working.
• Build with observability in mind from the start, covering instrumentation, logging, and monitoring so that your team can see what their systems are doing in production.
• Contribute to the team's growing Dev Ops capability, taking on operational responsibility for the systems you build.
• Code Quality and Engineering Practice
• Write clean, testable, secure code and hold that standard consistently, not just when it is convenient.
• Practise test-driven development and contribute to a culture where good testing is the norm, using AI to generate scaffolding and explore edge cases as part of that workflow.
• Participate actively in code review, giving and receiving feedback that improves the work and raises the bar for the whole team.
• Apply secure coding practices as a matter of course: dependency management, threat awareness, and security testing.
• AI-Native Engineering
• Use AI natively in your engineering work, as part of how you think through problems, generate and review code, and build and test solutions.
• Contribute to AI-powered workflows that improve the team's delivery capability, whether that is in automation, testing, code generation, or observability.
• Engage actively with the team's AI agents and tooling, helping to refine and improve them as your understanding of what works deepens.
• Bring a critical eye to AI-generated output, verifying quality and maintaining the standards you would apply to anything else you ship.
• Collaboration and Growth
• Work closely with your Tech Lead and teammates through pairing, mob programming, and shared problem-solving.
• Support less experienced engineers where you can, sharing knowledge through code review, pairing, and day-to-day conversation.
• Contribute to planning, refinement, stand-ups, reviews, and retrospectives as an engaged and thoughtful team member.
• Take an active interest in your own development, staying current with the technologies and practices the team uses and bringing new ideas back to the team.
• Required Experience and Skills
• Technical
• Solid experience as a software engineer with a proven ability to deliver complex features on production systems.
• Strong full-stack capability across backend and front-end development, with experience working with databases and cloud infrastructure.
• Practical experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Working knowledge of cloud platforms (Azure/AWS) and containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes).
• Sound security fundamentals: secure coding, dependency management, and an awareness of common vulnerabilities.
• Experience working on evolving systems, including refactoring and improving existing codebases.
• AI-Native Engineering Practice
• Demonstrable experience using AI as a genuine part of your engineering workflow, not just as a code completion tool.
• Comfortable working with AI-generated output critically, knowing how to verify, refine, and take responsibility for what ships.
• Behavioural
• High standards: you care about the quality of your work and take pride in shipping something you can stand behind.
• Collaborative: you work well with others, share openly, and make the people around you better.
• Self-directed: you can take a piece of work, make sensible decisions, and see it through without constant oversight.
• Comfortable with change: you adapt well when priorities shift or approaches evolve, and you contribute positively to that process.
• Curious and committed to learning: you keep developing your skills and bring new thinking back to the team.
• Nice to Have
• Experience in B2B Saa S or Citation domains such as HR, Health and Safety, Compliance, Certification, or e Learning.
• Experience building or contributing to AI agents or automated workflows in a production context.
• Experience with event-driven architectures, message queues, or reactive systems.
• Contributions to open source or active participation in technical communities.