Principal Engineer

Technify Talent; Newbury; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 135,000; Full time

Job summary

Technify Talent in Newbury is seeking a Principal Engineer to act as technical authority and right hand to our Head of Engineering. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role for someone who has operated at Principal or Staff level and enjoys untangling genuinely hard, messy problems.

You'll work on complex, distributed, real-time systems that process high volumes of live data and make time-critical decisions.

Qualifications

• Senior technical authority on complex distributed systems with production ships.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and containerised deployments.
• Experience working with hardware/physical-world components is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

• Own the whole-system technical picture from data ingestion to end-user experience
• Make cross-cutting architectural and technical calls and own the outcomes
• Set and uphold engineering standards across the team
• Help lead adoption of AI-assisted/agentic development practices
• Take on hard cross-boundary problems including major integrations and build-vs-buy decisions
• Stay hands-on with prototyping, spiking, debugging, and code reviews
• Support and unblock a strong team of engineers through technical credibility

Skills

Distributed systems

Microservices

Containerisation

Communication skills

Security clearance eligibility

Job description

Location: Newbury (hybrid — reactive dependent on workload)

About the Role

We're looking for a Principal Engineer to act as technical authority and right hand to our Head of Engineering. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role (not people management) for someone who's operated at Principal or Staff level, stays close to the code, and enjoys untangling genuinely hard, messy problems.

You'll work on complex, distributed, real-time systems that process high volumes of live data and make time-critical decisions.

What You'll Do

• Own the whole-system technical picture, from data ingestion through processing to the end-user experience
• Make the cross-cutting architectural and technical calls, and own the outcomes
• Set and uphold engineering standards across the team
• Help lead the organisation's adoption of AI-assisted / agentic development practices
• Take on the hardest cross-boundary problems: major integrations, technology choices, build-vs-buy decisions
• Stay hands-on, prototyping, spiking, debugging, and reviewing code alongside the team
• Support and unblock a strong team of engineers without formal management authority — leading through technical credibility

What We're Looking For

• Proven experience operating as a senior technical authority on complex, distributed systems — architecture you've designed that has shipped and survived contact with production
• Strong background in distributed systems, messaging/event-driven architectures, microservices, and containerised deployments
• Experience working on systems with a hardware or physical-world component (e.g. sensor integration, embedded interfaces, or similar) is a strong plus
• Comfortable reasoning across an entire technology stack, from low-level data sources through to operator-facing tools
• A track record of being the person others bring their hardest problems to
• Excellent communication skills — able to influence technical direction without formal authority
• Eligibility to obtain government security clearance is required for this role