Principal Engineer

CreateFuture; Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

CreateFuture, a digital consultancy, is seeking a Principal Engineer to own architecture, deep engineering foundations, and AI-enabled delivery across client projects. You will direct both your own intelligence and AI toward outcomes that matter, with system thinking, pragmatic delivery, and clear communication guiding decisions.

Operate across backend, cloud, data and front-end choices, mentoring teams, shaping proposals, and maintaining high-quality software in enterprise settings.

Job description

CreateFuture is a digital consultancy that builds digital products and services for major organisations across a wide spectrum of industries. We pride ourselves on a people‑first culture and strong client partnerships.

Principal Engineer

About this role

The bar has moved. Five years ago a strong engineer was measured by what they could build and how well they could mentor others to build it. Today, with Claude Code and agents, we produce quality work at a speed that would have looked superhuman in 2022.
We expect you to own the complete package: architecture, deep engineering foundations, communication, system thinking, and the judgement to direct both your own intelligence and AI toward outcomes that matter.

Your mindset

• Outcome obsessed – you care whether the problem was actually solved, not merely that a clever solution exists.
• Intellectually honest about uncertainty, taking a trust‑but‑verify approach and assuming the surprising bug is the one that will burn.
• Deeply pragmatic – you hold opinions loosely and decide for the systems in front of you, not for a preferred platform or language.
• Bias toward delivery – you iterate from the smallest working piece and treat documents and meetings as a means to that end.
• Relentlessly curious beyond immediate needs – you want to understand how the database stores things or why an inference call costs what it does.

AI as the accelerant

For a Principal to be truly exceptional, AI fluency is a first‑class competency, not a side skill. In practice that means:

• Setting AI up to succeed – you treat context engineering as a craft, architect clean interfaces, and build knowledge bases that enable AI to work on the codebase.
• Reviewing and choosing well – you read far more code than you write, catching assumptions, security flaws, architectural drift, and knowing where models fail.
• Working with non‑determinism – you build with AI components but treat success as a spectrum, using evals, golden datasets, structured outputs and fallback paths alongside unit tests.

Technical breadth across the full stack

• Backend – instinct for distributed systems, eventual consistency, queue health, aging APIs, thoughtful data modelling, and language‑agnostic solutions via AI.
• Cloud – cost‑aware and security‑aware by default, reaching for IaC and composing primitives rather than piecing together managed services.
• Data – modern pipelines, governance, lineage, vector stores and embeddings, treating data quality as seriously as production code.
• Web and mobile – clear view of what to pick today, and the ability to build “good enough” front‑ends yourself, enhanced with AI.

System thinking, consulting and commercial judgement

You recognise that technology is only about 30% of the picture; the rest is design, argument, commercial and political acumen, and the clarity to frame outcomes for senior leadership.

• You avoid gold‑plating and name when a project's real problem is not technical.
• You understand the durability of solutions versus fleeting trends, and you decide to keep or remove stack components accordingly.
• You remove unnecessary complexity while strengthening the remaining stack.

Leadership mentality

• Communicate clearly and frequently – documents, decisions, post‑mortems, design notes that become machine‑readable context for AI.
• Own decisions – you make and own them, preach benevolent dictation when appropriate.
• Mentor in AI fluency – coaching tooling, prompting and review discipline to double team productivity.
• Handle minimal line management – you self‑resolve, raise only by exception, and can manage financial controls when required.
• Disagree well – you argue with evidence and alter your stance when proven wrong.

What we're not looking for

• The gifted engineer who works in isolation rather than in a team.
• The one fluent with AI but shipping without guardrails and quality gates expected by enterprise clients.
• The one with strong technical opinions that cannot justify them commercially and becomes defensive.
• The pure manager who favours coordination over direct engineering involvement.
• The engineer who will not fully immerse in a client environment – on‑site work and trusted relationships are required.

What we’ll offer you

We trust people to do their best work, which means flexibility over rigid rules, impact over activity, and genuine investment in your professional and personal growth. You’ll be part of a supportive, friendly culture with smart, curious colleagues who care deeply about their work.

• Flexible working: hybrid and remote options; office hubs in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London and Bulgaria; occasional travel to client sites or CreateFuture offices.
• Independent time management – balance collaboration with client time and focused work; impact matters over busyness.

Inclusion at CreateFuture

We believe diverse teams build better workplaces and products. We aim to be a place where people feel able to be themselves and do their best work. We will provide adjustments or support during the application process when needed.