Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer (Data Platforms / APIs)

London | Full-time | High-Scale Data Infrastructure

We’re working with a global digital asset and market data group operating at the intersection of financial markets, crypto, and institutional-grade data platforms .

This business powers real-time market data, indices, and analytics used by institutional clients worldwide. The engineering challenge is non-trivial: billions of requests per month , always-on systems, and zero tolerance for downtime or inaccurate data.

They’re now hiring a Principal Software Engineer to own the technical direction across their core data platforms and APIs .

This is a senior, hands-on IC leadership role . You’ll set architectural direction, solve problems, and raise the technical bar across teams.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Owning and driving the long-term technical roadmap across high-scale data services (REST APIs, streaming, WebSockets, client-facing platforms)
• Designing and evolving resilient, high-throughput distributed systems operating 24/7
• Acting as the technical escalation point for complex, cross-team challenges (resiliency, uptime, architectural change at scale)
• Mentoring senior engineers on architecture, trade-offs, and operational best practice
• Leading platform-wide improvements in observability, testing strategy, and developer tooling
• Making pragmatic build vs buy decisions for core data and infrastructure components

What You’ll Bring:

• 8+ years’ backend engineering experience, with time operating at Staff or Principal level
• Deep experience designing, building, and running large-scale distributed systems
• Strong understanding of synchronous and asynchronous architectures (REST, streaming, event-driven systems)
• Experience supporting high-availability, global, always-on platforms , ideally in financial or data-heavy environments
• Strong production experience with Node.js or Go
• Solid database fundamentals (PostgreSQL, Redis, performance tuning)
• Strong DevSecOps mindset: CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, monitoring, logging, tracing
• Ability to influence senior technical and non-technical stakeholders without formal authority

Nice to have:

• Cloud-native architecture (Azure or GCP)
• Kafka or similar event-streaming platforms
• Kubernetes / Docker
• Observability tooling (Datadog, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry)
• Exposure to market data, financial systems, or regulated environments

What’s On Offer:

• £150,000 – £175,000 base salary
• 25% Bonus of base salary
• Share Scheme
• High ownership, real technical influence, and problems that genuinely matter

This is a rare opportunity for a senior engineer who wants to define architecture and own outcomes , not maintain legacy decisions.

💬 Apply via LinkedIn or message directly for a confidential conversation.