Principal Software Engineer - Forward Deployed

Principal SOFTWARE ENGINEER - FDE

Location: Remote | Type: Contract

Your Mission

We are looking for Staff Software Engineer who will Design and build scalable full-stack software systems that deliver measurable business value. Work directly with teams across Commercial, Manufacturing, and R&D to discover problems, navigate ambiguity, and ship practical solutions quickly. Develop AI-powered applications, including production RAG systems, LLM integrations, and optimized retrieval pipelines. Identify repeatable patterns in your work and collaborate with platform teams to generalize solutions into reusable frameworks. Lead technical initiatives, mentor engineers, and turn complex business challenges into reliable, production-ready systems.

What You’ll Do

Responsibilities

• Business: Immerse in operations until you think like an insider. Rapidly acquire domain expertise through direct observation, translate between business and engineering seamlessly, and mentor engineers in your area on immersion. Influence senior stakeholders effectively, manage complex stakeholder landscapes with competing agendas, and build trust rapidly with new stakeholders.
• Delivery: Lead rapid delivery initiatives across teams in your area, coach on prototype-first approaches, and establish trust through consistent fast delivery. Build complete applications rapidly across any technology stack, select the right tools for each problem, and define clear criteria for prototype-to-production transitions.
• Generative AI: Architect RAG systems for complex use cases across teams, implement advanced techniques (hybrid search, reranking, query expansion), mentor engineers on RAG best practices, and establish RAG standards. Lead evaluation strategy across teams, establishing annotation guidelines, training human-calibrated LLM judges, and building evaluation pipelines that connect tracing to datasets to experiments.
• People: Build high-performing teams across your area, navigate complex interpersonal dynamics, foster psychological safety, and create environments where diverse perspectives are valued. Influence through communication at all levels — from frontline to executive. Handle difficult conversations skilfully and train engineers in your area on effective communication.
• AI-Augmented Development: Optimise AI tool usage across teams in your area, train engineers on AI-augmented and agentic engineering workflows, evaluate new AI development tools, and establish practices that balance AI speed with verification rigour.
• Scale: Design complex multi-component systems end-to-end, evaluate architectural options for large initiatives across teams, guide technical decisions for your area, and mentor engineers on architecture. Create debt reduction strategies across teams, influence roadmap decisions to include debt work, and teach engineers when to accept debt for speed versus when to invest in quality.
• Documentation: Define documentation standards across teams in your area, create documentation systems and templates, train engineers on spec-driven development, and ensure documentation quality across projects. Lead pattern generalization initiatives, defining criteria for when to generalize versus keep custom.
• Reliability: Define reliability standards across teams in your area, drive post-incident improvements systematically, design capacity planning processes, and mentor engineers on SRE practices.
• Process: Lead lean transformations across teams in your area, design flow-optimised processes, coach engineers on lean principles, and balance speed with sustainability. Establish metrics that drive improvement.

Role Behaviours

• Own the Outcome: Drive accountability culture focused on outcomes not deliverables. Own business relationships and impact metrics across your function. Make trade-offs between custom solutions and generalisable work. There is no "I must run this by X." Ensure verification rigour for AI-generated code.
• Be Polymath Oriented: Champion cross-disciplinary learning. Create holistic solutions spanning technical and business domains. Embody the Renaissance Engineer ideal. Translate specialised knowledge into accessible explanations. Think like a business insider.
• Communicate with Precision: Create spec-driven development practices. Mentor others on precise communication. Span C-level executives to frontline workers. Drive clarity as a core value across your function. Represent the organisation externally.
• Don't Lose Your Curiosity: Drive team curiosity through challenging questions. Create environments where exploration and experimentation are encouraged. Model problem discovery orientation. Seek out ambiguity rather than avoiding it.
• Think in Systems: Shape systems design practices across your function. Conduct chaos engineering experiments. Influence cross-team architecture decisions. Create clarity from complexity. Bridge technical systems with business processes.

Practitioner-level Skills

• Architecture & Design: You design complex multi-component systems end-to-end, evaluate architectural options for large initiatives across teams, guide technical decisions for your area, and mentor engineers on architecture. You balance elegance with delivery needs.
• Code Quality & Review: You establish and enforce quality standards across teams in your area. You mentor engineers on effective code review, ensure verification depth for AI-assisted development, and drive testing strategies.
• Full-Stack Development: You build complete applications rapidly across any technology stack for teams in your area. You select the right tools for each problem, balance technical debt with delivery speed, and mentor engineers on full-stack development.
• Problem Discovery: You seek out undefined problems rather than avoiding them. You embed with users to discover latent needs, coach engineers in your area on problem discovery techniques, and turn ambiguity into clear problem statements.
• Rapid Prototyping & Validation: You lead rapid delivery initiatives across teams in your area, coach on prototype-first approaches, establish trust through consistent fast delivery, and define clear criteria for prototype-to-production transitions.
• Retrieval Augmentation: You architect RAG systems for complex use cases across teams, implement advanced techniques (hybrid search, reranking, query expansion), mentor engineers on RAG best practices, and establish RAG standards.
• AI-Augmented Development: You optimise AI tool usage across teams in your area, train engineers on AI-augmented workflows, evaluate new AI development tools, and establish practices that balance AI speed with verification rigour.
• Multi-Audience Communication: You influence through communication at all levels — from frontline to executive. You handle difficult conversations skilfully, train engineers in your area on effective communication, and represent teams across the function.
• Business Immersion: You immerse in operations until you think like an insider. You rapidly acquire domain expertise through direct observation, translate between business and engineering seamlessly, and mentor engineers in your area on immersion.
• Multi-Audience Communication: You influence through communication at all levels — from frontline to executive. You handle difficult conversations skillfully, train engineers in your area on effective communication, and represent teams across the function.
• Stakeholder Management: You influence senior stakeholders effectively across your area, manage complex stakeholder landscapes with competing agendas, build trust rapidly with new stakeholders, and shield teams from organisational friction.
• Team Collaboration: You build high-performing teams across your area, navigate complex interpersonal dynamics, foster psychological safety, and create environments where diverse perspectives are valued and heard.

What You Bring

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Software Engineering, or related field with 10+ years of relevant professional experience.
• Deep production experience with Python and JavaScript/TypeScript across backend and frontend, with demonstrated ability to work comfortably across the full stack.
• Strong experience with modern frontend frameworks (such as Next.js or React) and backend API development.
• Extensive experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred; Azure or GCP also valued), including infrastructure-as-code tools (such as CloudFormation or Terraform).
• Deep Working knowledge of multiple database paradigms, including relational databases (such as PostgreSQL), document databases, and key-value stores (such as Redis), with the ability to select the right storage technology for each problem.
• Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines (such as GitHub Actions), containerisation, and production deployment strategies.
• Demonstrable fluency with AI coding tools (such as Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or similar) and proven ability to design agentic engineering workflows and train teams on AI-augmented development practices.
• Hands-on experience architecting production generative AI applications (LLM integrations, vector databases, RAG systems, evaluation pipelines) is essential.
• Experience leading technical initiatives across multiple teams, mentoring engineers, and establishing engineering practices is required.
• Experience navigating ambiguous problem spaces, working directly with business stakeholders and end users, and shipping working solutions rapidly is required.
• Experience in an embedded, forward-deployed, or consulting-style engineering model is a strong plus.

Due to LinkedIn limitations, we are not able to post the complete job description. Detailed job description will be provided once we move ahead with your candidature.

Ready to Apply?

Let’s build the future of health together. Apply below or reach out to:

bhavik.rathod@newpage.io