Principal Engineer

Royal Bank of Scotland; City of Edinburgh; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Royal Bank of Scotland is seeking a Principal Engineer to shape software engineering across the bank, prioritising customer outcomes, performance, security and resilience in enterprise web applications.

You will lead architecture, design and governance within a collaborative hub, working with engineering centres of excellence, domain and enterprise architects, and senior stakeholders in a hybrid Edinburgh environment.

Qualifications

• Significant experience in software engineering and delivering large-scale enterprise web applications.
• Deep expertise in Java, Spring Boot Microservices, ReactJS, SQL and MongoDB, plus DevOps, CI/CD and Test Automation.
• Experience leading software development teams in a matrix structure and shaping technical direction.

Responsibilities

• As Principal Engineer, shape software engineering capability and customer-focused outcomes.
• Lead architecture, design and governance for scalable, secure, and high-performance systems.
• Collaborate with domain and enterprise architects to enable delivery across platforms and services.
• Drive automation of build, test and deployment activities and uplift engineering standards.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

Microservices

ReactJS

SQL

MongoDB

DevOps

CI/CD

Test Automation

Architectural design

Tools

Code repositories

Bug tracking tools

Wikis

Job description

Join us as a 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

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

As a 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 working 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. We'll also look to you to 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

Y ou'll come with 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.

Additionally, you'll implement programming best practice, especially around scalability, automation, virtualisation, optimisation, availability and performance. You'll use this expertise to shape technical direction, uplift engineering standards and drive meaningful impact across the bank's digital capabilities.

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

Hours

35

Job Posting Closing Date:

28/09/2026

Ways of Working:

Hybrid