Lead Principal Engineer

NatWest Group; London; Remote; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial institution in London is seeking a Lead Principal Engineer to design and engineer innovative software solutions. You'll be responsible for overseeing complex assignments, coordinating feature teams, and enhancing customer outcomes. The role requires expertise in Java, Spring Boot, and experience in microservices architecture. This position offers the chance to build high-performing teams in a remote-first environment.

Qualifications

• Significant experience in full stack engineering.
• Expert proficiency in Java and Spring Boot.
• Experience in designing and building distributed microservices.

Responsibilities

• Lead complex and technically challenging assignments.
• Define and oversee engineering and design solutions.
• Coordinate multiple feature teams.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

Microservices architecture

Containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)

REST and GraphQL APIs

System design

Tools

AWS

Code analysis tools

Job description

Join us as a Lead Principal Engineer

• This is a challenging role that will see you design and engineer software with the customer or user experience as the primary objective
• With your software development background, you’ll be working with architects to help define major components of the business-wide target architecture and roadmap
• You’ll gain valuable senior stakeholder exposure as well as the opportunity to hone your technical talents and leadership skills

What you'll do

As a Lead Principal Engineer, you’ll be creating great customer outcomes via engineering and innovative solutions to existing and new challenges, and technology designs which are innovative, customer centric, high performance, secure and robust.

You’ll be leading the more significant, complex and technically challenging assignments, coordinating multiple feature teams, making sure that their technical journeys support realisation of the targets, and deliver the values of the relevant metrics published to our investors.

You’ll also be:

• Defining, creating and providing oversight and governance of engineering and design solutions with a focus on end-to-end automation, simplification, resilience, security, performance, scalability and reusability
• Working within a platform or feature team along with software engineers to design and engineer complex software, scripts and tools to enable the delivery of bank platforms, applications and services, acting as a point of contact for solution design considerations
• Defining and developing architecture models and roadmaps of application and software components to meet business and technical requirements, driving common usability across products and domains
• Influencing the development of strategies and architecture at domain and enterprise levels, identifying transformational opportunities for the businesses and technology areas

The skills you'll need

To be successful in this role, you'll need significant experience in full stack engineering with expert level proficiency in Java, and Spring Boot or equivalent knowledge. You'll also bring people leadership and coaching experience with the capability to build high performing teams.

Additionally, you'll need a strong understanding of browser-side performance, security, and state management, along with experience of REST and GraphQL APIs, API-first design and headless architectures.Experience with AWS Cloud technologies is not essential, however would be hugely beneficial.

You’ll also need:

• Proven experience of designing, building, and scaling distributed microservice-based systems
• A working knowledge of containerised environments such as Docker and Kubernetes
• Familiarity with Test Driven Development and Behaviour Driven Development, unit or integration testing strategies, and static code analysis tools
• To be comfortable remaining hands-on with code, architecture reviews, and technical spikes
• Strong system design skills including scalability, fault tolerance, and performance

Hours

35

Job Posting Closing Date:

29/08/2025 Ways of Working:Remote First