Principal Software Engineer (Hybrid)

Responsibilities

We are representing a confidential technology consultancy seeking a Principal Software Engineer for a hybrid role in London (Waterloo). You will work with one to two clients per year, serving as a trusted technical leader and strategist. Your responsibilities will include:

• Rapidly building trust with clients and demonstrating technical expertise aligned with their domain and objectives
• Driving platform engineering work, connecting long-term technical vision to deliverable outcomes
• Leading platform strategy and delivery across diverse platform types
• Advising clients on architecture, scalability, and platform evolution while connecting technical decisions to product and business outcomes
• Collaborating on systems involving the full ML lifecycle from data ingestion and preprocessing to model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring
• Designing and managing high-level technical roadmaps for large engagements
• Coaching client engineering teams, transferring knowledge and leveling up practices
• Influencing executive technical decisions and planning work that involves stakeholders across client organizations
• Partnering with account teams on planning, opportunity identification, stakeholder relationships, and pre-sales scope shaping
• Facilitating retrospectives, strategy sessions, and technical deep-dives to improve team and project outcomes
• Identifying, mitigating, and resolving blockers to team progress
• Demonstrating leadership in scalable system design, modular architecture, and platform-oriented development

What We're Looking For

Our client requires a Principal Engineer with 10+ years of proven success across diverse projects. You should be a trusted expert and leader capable of guiding ambiguous initiatives and architecting scalable solutions. Essential qualifications include:

• Built and shipped production-grade platforms: reusable foundations, tools, infrastructure, and workflows that enable teams to ship faster and more reliably
• Taken AI and agentic systems from prototype to production, with strong understanding of infrastructure, authentication, and observability
• Delivered high-stakes consulting engagements across multiple language paradigms, stacks, ecosystems, and client industries
• Built high-quality, maintainable software collaboratively and incrementally, tailored to unique client needs
• Led development and delivery of production-grade software using languages and frameworks such as Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, and SQL
• Actively experimented with AI development tools and translated experimentation into faster, higher-quality delivery
• Track record of understanding, assessing, and embracing new tooling and trends within the software industry
• Built or integrated AI/ML features including recommendation engines, NLP, computer vision, predictive analytics, RAG pipelines, and agents
• Successfully led modernization and replatforming efforts to align legacy systems with business needs
• Led and delivered solutions to architecture-level problems including scalability, security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and observability
• Facilitated alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders through ambiguity and complexity
• Provided mentorship and team support at scale while sharing knowledge and improving team practices
• Brought depth in testing strategies, observability, fault tolerance, and secure engineering practices
• Applied architectural patterns to evaluate tradeoffs and drive clear, documented design rationale

Strongly preferred skills include:

• Platform engineering: building reusable software foundations, internal developer platforms, and infrastructure
• Data Engineering: including platforms like Databricks for data processing and analytics
• Delivering production agentic systems, including RAG pipelines, vector search, and agentic frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, and n8n
• DevSecOps and DevOps
• MLOps
• Infrastructure as Code

This is a hybrid position requiring one day per week in the Waterloo, London office.

How We Work with You

Our talent team at Get A Job.ai screens all applications and presents qualified candidates to our client. When you apply through our platform, a recruiter will contact you to discuss your background and the opportunity in detail. We then coordinate your submission to the client and support you throughout the interview process.

Please apply exclusively through Get A Job.ai. Do not contact the client directly, as all candidate communication is managed through our recruiting team to ensure a smooth and professional experience.

Pay

Pay details will be discussed with qualified candidates during the screening process.

Equal Opportunity

Get A Job.ai is committed to inclusive hiring practices. We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds and work with clients who share our commitment to building diverse, equitable workplaces.