Principal Engineer

Description:

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to act as the most senior hands‑on technical expert for our leading Risk Screening platform. This role partners closely with architecture, service, product, and engineering teams to ensure that agreed designs are implemented to the highest technical and operational standards.

A core focus of the role is ownership of the system’s non‑functional characteristics, including end‑to‑end latency, cloud scalability, resilience, and the effective handling of large and growing data sets.

The Principal Engineer ensures these qualities are deliberately designed for, correctly implemented, and continuously validated in production.

Rather than owning architecture in isolation, the Principal Engineer is the expert implementor and problem solver: translating architectural intent into robust, performant, and secure production systems. You will use your knowledge of AWS Services and Java development to tackle the hardest technical challenges, proactively identify operational risks, and provide deep technical guidance that sets the highest standard across all engineering teams working on the product.

This is the most senior individual contributor role with broad influence, focused on technical excellence, delivery confidence, and long‑term sustainability.

Technical Leadership & Implementation Excellence

Act as the senior‑most technical authority for implementation within the Risk Screening platform, ensuring designs are realised accurately and pragmatically.
Work in close partnership with enterprise and solution architects to validate designs, challenge assumptions, and guide effective development approaches by the engineering teams.
Lead the implementation of the most complex and business‑critical changes, setting the standard for quality, performance, and maintainability.
Provide hands‑on expertise in Java‑based systems, including concurrency, performance tuning, memory management, and API design.

Non‑Functional Ownership & System Performance

Take a leading role in defining, implementing, and validating non‑functional requirements, including system latency, throughput, scalability, and reliability.
Drive solutions for cloud scaling and capacity management, ensuring the platform performs predictably under variable and peak loads.
Provide deep expertise in working with large databases and data stores, including performance optimisation, data access patterns, and operational scaling.

Problem Solving & Technical Decision Support

Solve the most complex and ambiguous technical problems, particularly those spanning multiple components or teams.
Act as a point of escalation for deep technical issues that require system‑level understanding and experience.
Support engineering teams in making sound technical decisions, helping them understand trade‑offs and long‑term consequences.

Cloud & Platform Expertise (AWS)

Serve as a deep AWS expert, guiding teams on best‑practice use of AWS services with a strong focus on elastic cloud scaling and performance under load.
Ensure implementations support horizontal and vertical scaling, efficient resource utilisation, and predictable behaviour as demand grows.
Guide and review approaches to autoscaling, and workload management, aligned with agreed architectures.
Review cloud implementations to confirm they meet expectations for availability, scalability, cost-efficiency, and compliance.

Operational Excellence & Risk Management

Proactively identify operational risks, scaling limits, and reliability concerns within existing and planned implementations.
Drive improvements in resilience, monitoring, alerting, and incident prevention, informed by production behaviour.
Partner with Site Reliability Engineers, platform, and operations teams to improve system operability and reduce customer impact.

Engineering Standards & Quality

Champion engineering standards across coding, testing, deployment, and operational readiness.
Conduct deep technical reviews of critical changes, focusing on non‑functional requirements such as performance, security, and reliability.
Help teams reduce technical debt through pragmatic, incremental improvements aligned to product priorities.

Coaching, Mentorship & Influence

Act as a technical mentor and coach to senior engineers and technical leads across the organisation.
Support engineers in developing stronger implementation skills and deeper system‑level thinking.
Influence engineering culture through example, constructive challenge, and a focus on practical excellence.

Required Skills & Experience

Extensive experience as a Principal Engineer, or equivalent senior technical role on large‑scale, production systems.
Deep, hands‑on expertise in Java (Java 11+ preferred), including JVM behaviour, concurrency, and performance optimisation.
Strong, practical experience building and running systems on AWS, with a focus on real‑world operational trade‑offs.
Proven ability to implement and operate distributed systems at scale, with particular emphasis on performance and scalability.
Strong experience working with large databases or data platforms, including performance tuning and operational management.
Strong understanding of production operations, including incident management, observability, and reliability engineering.
Ability to influence and guide teams through technical credibility rather than formal authority.