Lead Software Engineer

McNally Recruitment Ltd; City of Edinburgh, Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

McNally Recruitment Ltd partners with a large UK client to hire a Principal Engineer for London or Edinburgh. You will design and engineer software with a focus on customer outcomes, contribute to architecture and the centre of excellence, and collaborate with stakeholders to lift the organization's software capability.

The candidate will work hands-on with Java, Spring Boot, AWS, and data technologies, leading 3–5 engineers, delivering enterprise web apps, and shaping technical direction.

Qualifications

• Proven track record delivering large-scale enterprise web apps.
• Strong design and architecture experience in modern Java-based stacks.
• Experience leading software teams in a matrix organisation.

Responsibilities

• Create customer-centric software designs and architectures for scalable systems.
• Collaborate with domain and enterprise architects to align with roadmaps.
• Develop automated build, test, and deployment pipelines and practices.
• Provide governance and oversight of engineering and design solutions.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

SQL

MongoDB

AWS

Snowflake

ReactJS

CI/CD

DevOps

Leadership

Job description

Principal Engineer - London OR Edinburgh (6 days PER MONTH in the office)

We are collaborating to source a Principal Engineer for a large UK client. You will work from the Edinburgh or London office, working 6 days per month in the office and the rest remotely.

This is a challenging role where you'll design and engineer software, with the customer or user experience as the primary objective. You’ll actively contribute to our architecture, design and engineering centre of excellence, collaborating to improve the bank’s overall software engineering capability. You’ll gain valuable stakeholder exposure as you build and leverage relationships, as well as the opportunity to hone your technical talents

What you'll do

• Create 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.
• Work with software engineers in the production and prototyping of innovative ideas, engaging with domain and enterprise architects to validate and leverage these in wider contexts, by incorporating the relevant architectures.
• Design and develop software with a focus on the automation of build, test and deployment activities, while developing the discipline of software engineering across the business.

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
• Designing, producing, testing and implementing the working code, along with applying Agile methods to the development of software with the use of DevOps techniques

The skills you'll need

• Coding is KEY to the role, with the main tech stack being Java, Postgres, MongoDB, AWS (essential), and Snowflake.
• Significant experience in software engineering, along with significant and demonstrable experience in designing and delivering large scale enterprise web applications, with deep expertise in Java, Spring Boot Microservices, ReactJS, SQL, Databases, MongoDB, DevOps, CI/CD and Test Automation.
• Experience implementing programming best practices, especially around scalability, automation, virtualisation, optimisation, availability and performance.
• Ability to shape technical direction, uplift engineering standards and drive meaningful impact across the client’s digital capabilities.
• Experience of leading a team of 3-5 Engineers.

You'll also need:

• A strong background in leading software development teams in a matrix structure, introducing and executing technical strategies
• Proven experience of deploying workloads in public or private cloud, alongside test-driven development using automated test frameworks, mocking and stubbing, and unit testing tools
• A background in designing or implementing APIs, and in working with code repositories, bug tracking tools and wikis
• The ability to rapidly and effectively understand and translate product and business requirements into technical solutions

PLEASE NOTE THE SALARY INCLUDES BENEFITS-AS-CASH and will vary between Edinburgh and London.