Principal Software Engineer

Principal Engineer – Scalable SaaS / Data Platforms

Location: UK remote (optional office presence - South West)

The Brief

We are supporting a fast-growing technology organisation in the search for a Principal Engineer to help scale a complex, globally deployed SaaS platform.

This is a senior individual contributor role with strong technical leadership expectations - ideal for someone who enjoys solving complex engineering challenges at scale while influencing architecture and engineering direction.

The Opportunity

You will take ownership of critical areas of a large-scale platform, helping to evolve architecture, improve performance, and support rapid international growth.

Working closely with engineering leadership and cross-functional teams, you will:

• Lead design and architectural decisions across key product areas
• Build and scale distributed systems handling high-volume data workloads
• Support the evolution of a SaaS platform serving global enterprise customers
• Influence engineering standards, tooling, and best practice across teams
• Partner with product and technical stakeholders to shape roadmap direction
• Drive improvements across scalability, resilience, and performance

A key focus will be scaling platform capability - supporting increased data volumes, users, and integrations while maintaining reliability and speed.

The Candidate

We are looking for an experienced engineer with deep technical expertise and a track record of operating at scale:

• Strong background in software engineering and system design
• Experience building and scaling distributed, data-intensive platforms
• Proven ability to design robust, scalable SaaS architectures
• Deep understanding of modern engineering principles and best practices
• Experience working in cloud-native environments
• Ability to navigate complexity and bring clarity to ambiguous technical challenges
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to technical leadership

Technical Environment

Experience with modern architectures and tooling is expected, with exposure to technologies such as:

• Cloud platforms and containerisation (e.g. Kubernetes)
• Event-driven and microservices architectures
• Large-scale data processing and search technologies
• Modern backend development languages and frameworks

Why Apply?

• Work on genuinely complex, high-impact engineering challenges
• Join a fast-scaling, product-led technology business
• Influence architecture and engineering direction at scale
• Fully remote-first culture with flexibility
• Strong compensation and long-term growth opportunity