Principal Backend & Cloud-Native Engineer — UK Remote

Turnitin; Birmingham; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first culture

Health care coverage

Education reimbursement

Competitive PTO

Charitable contribution match

Monthly wellness or home office budget

Job summary

Turnitin, a remote-first leader in education tech, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to help shape core platform capabilities and shared backend services used across Turnitin products. You will lead architectural decisions and build scalable, cloud-native solutions that support millions of users.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with product and architecture teams, and drive reliability, security, and performance through best practices across distributed teams.

Qualifications

• Significant experience building and operating large-scale backend systems.
• Strong expertise in Java and modern cloud technologies.
• Experience with AWS serverless services (Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, SNS, SQS, EventBridge), as well as Kubernetes and cloud-native tech.
• Experience with CI/CD tools, including build, deployment, and test automation.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, APIs, scalability, and software architecture.
• Experience influencing technical direction and leading complex engineering initiatives.
• Excellent collaboration and communication within distributed teams.
• Passion for mentoring and supporting the growth of other engineers.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of shared backend services and platform capabilities.
• Drive architectural decisions and technical strategy across multiple teams.
• Build scalable, highly available cloud-native solutions using Java and AWS technologies.
• Mentor engineers and promote engineering excellence throughout the organization.
• Collaborate with product, architecture, and engineering teams to solve complex technical challenges.
• Champion best practices in software quality, performance, reliability, and security.

Skills

Backend systems

Java

AWS serverless

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Distributed systems

APIs/Scalability

Technical leadership

Collaboration

Mentoring

Job description

Turnitin, a remote-first leader in education tech, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to help shape core platform capabilities and shared backend services used across Turnitin products. You will lead architectural decisions and build scalable, cloud-native solutions that support millions of users.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with product and architecture teams, and drive reliability, security, and performance through best practices across distributed teams.