Principal Engineer (£160k + benefits)

Manchester Digital; Manchester; A distancia; GBP 144.000 - 176.000; Jornada completa

Ventajas ofrecidas por este puesto de trabajo

Remote-first

Client visits onsite occasionally

Descripción de la vacante

Manchester Digital is seeking a Principal Engineer to join a software consultancy at the forefront of AI-native software engineering. You’ll be the go-to technical expert on client projects, defining architecture and technical direction while lifting the capability of the team.

You’ll engage stakeholders up to CTO and CEO level, framing decisions in business terms and championing AI-driven context engineering. The role offers a remote-first setup with occasional client onsite.

Formación

• Strong background in large-scale distributed systems and cloud architectures.
• Experience with AI-enabled software engineering and vector databases.
• Proven ability to lead architectural directions and mentor others.
• Stakeholder management up to C-level with business awareness.

Responsabilidades

• Serve as the architectural lead on client projects and set technical direction.
• Mentor and raise the capability of engineers across the team.
• Engage stakeholders up to CTO/CEO and translate tech decisions to business terms.
• Champion AI-enabled engineering and proper context engineering practices.

Conocimientos

Distributed systems

Cloud & IaC

Data pipelines & embeddings

AI-assisted engineering

Consulting & stakeholder management

Descripción del empleo

Great opportunity for a Principal Engineer to join a software consultancy at the forefront of AI-native software engineering.

The company employs around 500 people, works with a mix of large enterprises and fast‑growing scale‑ups, and their engineers are already using agents to deliver quality work for clients at a pace that wasn’t possible until now.

As a Principal Engineer, you’ll be the go‑to technical expert on client projects and will be responsible for architecture, technical direction and raising the level of the engineers around you.

You’ll be dealing with stakeholders up to CTO and CEO level, so you’ll need the commercial awareness to frame technical decisions in business terms and the confidence to call out when a problem isn’t a technical one.

AI is a core part of the role rather than a side skill – you’ll set AI up to succeed and treat context engineering as a craft (the right files, specs, examples and constraints), pick the right tools for the job and mentor the team in AI fluency.

The culture is pragmatic and delivery focused; they value outcomes over output, build the smallest thing that works and then iterate.

Skills

• Distributed systems
• Cloud (cost and security aware) and IaC
• Data pipelines, vector stores and embeddings
• AI assisted engineering (Claude Code, agents, evals)
• Consulting and stakeholder management

You should be tech agnostic and expect to work with a variety of modern tech including Java, Node, .NET, Python, AWS, Azure, GCP etc.

The money is good too – up to £160k plus benefits including remote first working with occasional time onsite with clients to build relationships in person.