Principal Engineer
Principal Engineer
Location: Newbury (hybrid — reactive dependent on workload)
£90,000 + bonus + healthcare
About the Role
We're looking for a Principal Engineer to act as technical authority and right hand to our Head of Engineering. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role (not people management) for someone who's operated at Principal or Staff level, stays close to the code, and enjoys untangling genuinely hard, messy problems.
You'll work on complex, distributed, real-time systems that process high volumes of live data and make time-critical decisions.
What You'll Do
- Own the whole-system technical picture, from data ingestion through processing to the end-user experience
- Make the cross-cutting architectural and technical calls, and own the outcomes
- Set and uphold engineering standards across the team
- Help lead the organisation's adoption of AI-assisted / agentic development practices
- Take on the hardest cross-boundary problems: major integrations, technology choices, build-vs-buy decisions
- Stay hands-on, prototyping, spiking, debugging, and reviewing code alongside the team
- Support and unblock a strong team of engineers without formal management authority — leading through technical credibility
What We're Looking For
- Proven experience operating as a senior technical authority on complex, distributed systems — architecture you've designed that has shipped and survived contact with production
- Strong background in distributed systems, messaging/event-driven architectures, microservices, and containerised deployments
- Experience working on systems with a hardware or physical-world component (e.g. sensor integration, embedded interfaces, or similar) is a strong plus
- Comfortable reasoning across an entire technology stack, from low-level data sources through to operator-facing tools
- A track record of being the person others bring their hardest problems to
- Excellent communication skills — able to influence technical direction without formal authority
- Eligibility to obtain government security clearance is required for this role
If this is of interest and you'd like to understand more about the role or the business, please apply directly to this advert, and one of the team will be in contact.