Principal Engineer

Principal Engineer

Up to £120,000

Hybrid Working (Leeds City Centre once a fortnight)

I’m currently partnered with a seriously exciting tech business that’s scaling their UK engineering function and investing heavily in modern software engineering, AI adoption, and platform innovation.

They’re now looking for a Principal Engineer to work closely with the CTO and help shape the technical direction of the organisation as they continue to grow. This isn’t one of those “Principal Engineer” roles where you’re miles away from the tech. They want someone who can still get hands-on when needed, influence architecture across multiple teams, mentor engineers, and drive engineering standards across the business.

The Role

As a Principal Engineer, you’ll sit right at the heart of the engineering organisation, helping define technical strategy, influencing architectural decisions, and driving innovation across a modern cloud-native environment. You’ll work closely with engineering leadership, product teams, and senior stakeholders to build scalable systems while helping shape how AI is integrated into both products and engineering workflows.

Key Responsibilities

• Define technical strategy and architecture across multiple engineering teams

• Drive engineering standards, scalability, security, and performance best practices

• Mentor and support senior engineers across the organisation

• Evaluate and introduce emerging technologies, particularly around AI tooling and agentic AI systems

• Partner closely with the CTO and leadership team on long-term technical direction

• Help build a culture focused on ownership, quality, and continuous improvement

Skills & Experience

• Strong background in Node.js, Python, or Kotlin within distributed cloud environments

• Experience designing large-scale microservice architectures and high-availability systems

• Strong cloud experience across AWS or Azure, alongside containerisation and CI/CD

• Keen interest in AI-assisted engineering and modern AI tooling such as Copilot, Claude, LangChain, etc

Nice To Have

• Exposure to platform engineering, DevSecOps, or SRE environments

• Knowledge of modern AI frameworks and tooling

Benefits

• Hybrid working

• Bonus scheme

• Private healthcare

• Strong personal development focus

This is genuinely a brilliant opportunity for an experienced engineer who enjoys solving complex technical problems, influencing engineering culture, and helping shape what “great” looks like across an organisation.

Drop me a message if you’d be open to hearing more.