Principal Engineer

Metro Bank Plc; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working

Competitive salary

Discretionary annual bonus

Pension scheme

Healthcare

Life assurance

Colleague discount portal

Job summary

Metro Bank plc seeks a Principal Engineer to lead a product squad, co-owning delivery with a Product Manager. You will set engineering direction for payments, onboarding, lending, and core banking, shaping architecture and cloud-native platforms for safe, frequent releases.

You will collaborate across squads, drive best practices in CI/CD, observability, and security, and embed AI-enabled engineering techniques with strong governance.

Qualifications

• Significant software engineering experience in agile, product-led or squad-based delivery.
• Strong judgement across distributed systems, APIs, event streaming and cloud-native design.
• Hands-on credibility with depth in one area and breadth across frontend, backend, data and infra.
• Deep experience with cloud-native platforms, Kubernetes, IaC, CI/CD, and observability.
• Confidence using AI-enabled engineering tools while ensuring human oversight.
• Proven ability to build secure, observable, resilient services in regulated environments.
• Clear communication and coaching skills for cross-team collaboration.
• Familiarity with modern toolchains like GitHub Actions, Kafka, Kong, Databricks, AKS, React, Java.

Responsibilities

• Co-own a high-performing engineering squad with a Product Manager and set technical direction.
• Define and evolve architecture across distributed systems and API strategy.
• Architect and scale cloud-native platforms enabling safe, rapid delivery.
• Lead by pairing on complex problems and coaching engineers.
• Drive engineering excellence with testing, CI/CD, security, observability and incident response.
• Embed AI-assisted engineering practices while retaining human judgement and quality gates.
• Design robust third-party and vendor integration patterns with governance and automation.
• Foster an open, collaborative engineering culture focused on experimentation and improvement.

Skills

Principal leadership

Cloud-native architecture

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Microservices

API gateways

Observability

Distributed systems

AI-assisted engineering

Team coaching

Security & compliance

GitHub Actions

Kafka

Kong

Databricks

Azure Kubernetes Service

React/Java

Tools

GitHub Actions

Kafka

Kong

Databricks

Azure Kubernetes Service

Job description

As we shape the next chapter of our growth, we're reimagining what a modern, relationship-led bank can be. This is a rare opportunity to join a business that is thinking boldly about its future, challenging traditional ways of working and creating the foundations for long-term success. We're looking for people who are energised by ambition, excited by possibility and motivated by the opportunity to help shape what comes next.

As a Principal Engineer, you’ll be a senior technical leader within our Transformation Engineering Chapter, co-owning a product squad with a Product Manager and setting the engineering direction for critical banking services across areas such as payments, onboarding, lending and core banking. You’ll stay close to the code, shape architecture, raise delivery standards and help our squads ship safely, independently and frequently.

The Assessment Day for this role will take place at the end of September/beginning of October.

What you will do:

• Co-own a high-performing engineering squad with a Product Manager, making pragmatic technical decisions on scope, sequencing and approach within agreed guardrails.
• Define and evolve technical architecture across distributed systems, domain boundaries, API strategy, event-driven integration, data flows and non-functional requirements.
• Architected and scaled cloud-native platforms, enabling true continuous deployment and progressive release strategies to deliver changes safely, rapidly, and with minimal customer impact.
• Lead from the front by pairing on complex problems, reviewing critical changes, unblocking delivery and coaching engineers through real work.
• Drive engineering excellence through test automation, trunk-based development, CI/CD optimisation, secure coding, observability, service-level objectives and effective production incident response.
• Embed AI-assisted engineering practices into day-to-day delivery, including drafting, review support, test generation and traceability, while keeping human judgement and quality gates at the centre.
• Design robust third-party and vendor integration patterns, including COTS abstraction layers, bank-owned APIs, contract testing, release governance and deployment automation.
• Create an open, collaborative and inclusive engineering culture that encourages experimentation, continuous improvement and technical excellence.

And… we are a bank, so risk is part of everything we do. We like people who take responsibility, do the right thing for customers, colleagues and Metro Bank, and have the confidence to call out any concerns. In this role, that means building secure, resilient, well-governed technology from the start - not treating risk, reliability or auditability as an afterthought.

What you will need

• Significant software engineering experience, ideally with principal-level technical leadership in agile, product-led or squad-based delivery environments.
• Strong technical architecture judgement across distributed systems, microservices, APIs, event streaming, data platforms, integration patterns and cloud-native service design.
• Hands-on engineering credibility, with depth in one or two areas and breadth across modern software delivery, including front-end, back-end, data and infrastructure.
• Deep experience with cloud-native platforms, Kubernetes or equivalent container orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, progressive delivery, observability and production operations.
• Confidence using AI-enabled engineering tools to improve quality, speed and traceability, while maintaining strong human oversight.
• Proven ability to build, run and continuously improve secure, observable, resilient and auditable services in a regulated or high-accountability environment.
• Clear, collaborative communication and coaching skills, with the ability to influence engineers, product partners, platform teams and third-party delivery partners.
• Practical experience with modern engineering toolchains and technologies such as GitHub Actions, Kafka, Kong, Databricks, Azure Kubernetes Service, React, React Native, Java, automated testing and API gateways.

Our promise to you…

• We will make sure that you are well-rewarded by providing you with a competitive salary, discretionary annual bonus, and benefits including a generous holiday allowance, pension scheme, healthcare, life assurance, and access to our colleague discount portal
• We will offer you hybrid working that is genuinely flexible, giving you greater freedom to balance where and how you work around your role and home-life

Diverse teams really are the best teams. We know that candidates (especially women, research tells us) may be put off applying for a job unless they can tick every box. We also know that ‘normal’ office hours aren’t always doable, and while we can’t accommodate every flexible working request we are happy to be asked. So if you are excited about working with us and think you can do much of what we are looking for but aren’t sure if you are 100% there yet… why not give it a whirl? Good luck!

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