Principal Engineer
Clearly is a fleet management intelligence platform on a mission to bring clarity to one of the most data-rich yet analytically underserved industries in the world.
Fleet operators today are drowning in fragmented data, with little ability to turn that data into actionable insight. Clearly solves this by acting as the intelligence layer above existing fleet infrastructure: unifying disparate telematics streams, applying AI-powered analytics, and delivering the Total Cost of Ownership visibility that enterprise fleet operators need to make smarter decisions at scale.
We're a small, ambitious team moving fast. Every person we hire has a direct impact on the product, the culture, and the trajectory of the company. We're backed by strong commercial traction and a clear vision, and we're looking for people who want to build something that matters from the ground up.
As Clearly's Principal Software Engineer, you will define how we build. This is the most senior individual contributor role in the business - you'll set the technical direction of the platform, establish the patterns and standards the team builds around, and make foundational architectural decisions that will shape Clearly for years to come. You'll be hands-on in the stack while operating at a level of leverage that goes well beyond implementation: influencing product strategy, representing Clearly technically with enterprise customers and partners, and ensuring that every layer of the platform - from data ingestion to customer-facing interfaces - is built to scale.
This is a rare opportunity to join as a founding-level technical voice at a company with real commercial traction, and to leave a lasting mark on both the product and the engineering culture.
- Define the technical architecture of Clearly's platform - making long-term decisions across data ingestion, processing, APIs, and interfaces that the team can build confidently around.
- Establish engineering standards, patterns, and tooling choices that raise the quality and consistency of everything we ship.
- Design and build robust data ingestion pipelines from telematics providers, handling high-volume, multi-tenant data reliably.
- Develop and maintain our analytics processing layer, working with modern OLAP tooling to power real-time fleet intelligence.
- Build and maintain APIs that serve data to internal systems and customer-facing products.
- Represent Clearly technically in enterprise customer conversations, strategic partner engagements, and where relevant, investor discussions.
- Mentor and elevate the engineers around you - through code review, pairing, and raising the collective technical bar of the team.
- Collaborate closely with the CEO and Product to align technical strategy with business priorities.
- Experience operating as a staff, principal, or equivalent senior IC - someone who has been the most senior technical voice on a team and thrived in that role.
- A strong track record of making long-term architectural decisions across complex, data-intensive systems that proved right over time.
- Experience applying machine learning or statistical modelling to real-world, high-volume datasets - with a focus on producing insights that are explainable and operationally useful, not just technically impressive
- Deep expertise in building and scaling data pipelines and APIs, with sound full-stack fundamentals.
- Experience with cloud-native infrastructure and modern data tooling.
- A builder's instinct: you're hands-on, pragmatic, and you ship - but you also know when to slow down and get the foundations right.
- The credibility and communication skills to represent technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders, including customers and leadership.
- Proven ability to mentor engineers and improve the people and culture around you.
- Experience with telematics, IoT, financial or other high-frequency data sources
- Familiarity with predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, or cost modelling in an industrial or logistics context
- Familiarity with ClickHouse, Supabase, or similar modern data stack tooling
- Background in fleet management, analytics, logistics, or industrial SaaS
- Prior experience as a founding engineer or first principal-level hire at an early-stage company
We’re at the frontier of an industrial sea-change of a scale greater than the birth of the internet. Clearly is your opportunity to work with next generation technology and build at a pace and enablement level never seen before. We are explicitly trying to get the capabilities we as builders have at our fingertips, into the hands of everyday workers throughout the Fleet Management industry.
- Monthly budget to spend on your own tools to enable you to learn new platforms and capabilities.
- Meaningful stake in the business - if we win you win.
- 25 days annual leave + bank holidays.
- Flexible hybrid working arrangements.
- Private Healthcare (including dental and optical cover).
- Monthly wellness allowance (gym, cycle to work, etc.).
- Dog-friendly office.
- Outstanding career progression opportunities.
- Ability to help shape our benefits package as we grow.