At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead the engineering direction of a core banking platform and drive high-quality changes.
- Company: Join the UK's fourth-largest building society undergoing impressive engineering transformation.
- Benefits: Hybrid working, strong focus on wellbeing, and investment in modern engineering tools.
- Other info: Collaborative culture focused on continuous improvement and professional development.
- Why this job: Shape the future of mission-critical systems and make a lasting impact.
- Qualifications: Strong software engineering background and experience with large-scale systems.
The predicted salary is between 80000 - 100000 £ per year.
We're partnering with the UK’s fourth-largest building society and they genuinely one of the most impressive engineering transformations happening right now. They are seeking an experienced Principal Engineer to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of a mission-critical Core Banking platform supporting millions of customer financial journeys. This is a rare opportunity to influence the engineering direction of a platform that underpins savings, mortgages, transactions and financial servicing, where accuracy, resilience and trust are paramount.
About the Role
As Principal Engineer, you will define and drive the engineering standards, architectural patterns and “paved roads” that enable teams to deliver safe, frequent, high-quality changes across a complex, regulated environment. You’ll work across multiple engineering squads, guiding the evolution of core systems while ensuring platform stability, performance and compliance are never compromised.
Key Responsibilities
- Set technical direction and establish engineering standards and best practices
- Define and scale CI/CD pipelines, Golden Paths and secure-by-design frameworks
- Architect for resilience, observability and high availability
- Lead platform modernisation, including decoupling legacy systems and reducing technical debt
- Improve engineering performance across lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate and recovery
- Embed quality, security and compliance practices into the software development lifecycle
- Coach and mentor engineers, building high-performing teams and communities of practice
- Collaborate with Architecture, Security, Risk and Product to deliver platform-wide outcomes
About You
- Strong software engineering background (e.g. Java, .NET or similar)
- Experience working on large-scale, business-critical systems
- Deep expertise in architecture, reliability, observability and distributed systems
- Proven track record of improving engineering flow and delivery performance (VFQ metrics)
- Experience leading platform initiatives or owning critical services
- Comfortable working with long-lived, high-integrity systems (experience in core banking or financial services advantageous)
- Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills
Why Join?
- Opportunity to shape the engineering foundations of a core banking platform
- Work within a high-impact, transformation-focused environment
- Strong investment in modern engineering capability and tooling
- Collaborative, values-driven culture with a focus on continuous improvement
- Hybrid working and a strong emphasis on wellbeing and development
If you’re looking for a role where you can define how mission-critical systems are built, evolved and operated at scale, this is an opportunity to make a lasting impact.
