Principal Engineer, AI & Cloud Platform

Motorway; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

London office with hybrid schedule

Stock options

Pension/NEST

Books, courses, conferences budget

Health insurance

Cycle to work

Volunteer day

Job summary

Motorway, the UK's largest online car-selling platform, is expanding its engineering leadership with a Principal Engineer who will set technical direction across multiple product areas. You will own the AWS relationship, drive architectural decisions, and lead AI initiatives for software engineering, while collaborating with leadership to shape the platform for scale.

The role is based in London with a hybrid work schedule, offering significant scope to influence engineering standards,

Qualifications

• Ten years or more in software engineering, with several in staff or principal level.
• Track record of setting technical direction across teams or product areas.
• Exceptional AWS expertise with production-scale serverless, containers, networking, identity and data services.
• Judgement to evaluate platforms and say no to ones that don’t earn their place.
• Strong API and identity architecture knowledge: OAuth 2.0, OIDC, PKCE, JWT, IAM patterns.
• Experience setting observability and reliability standards and incident practices.
• Ability to read or write code in most languages and trace user requests through to data.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy across multiple product areas and justify it with data to leadership.
• Identify cross-cutting architectural risks and resolve them before scaling.
• Set engineering standards, patterns and documentation norms for reliable inputs to engineers and agents.
• Raise reliability, observability, security, and incident practices across engineering.
• Lead AI for Software Engineering initiatives, evaluating models and driving adoption.
• Develop staff engineers and technical leads to multiply leadership capacity.
• Own the AWS relationship on the engineering side, including reviews and cost decisions.
• Represent Motorway publicly at AWS summits, conferences and internal forums.

Job description

Motorway, the UK's largest online car-selling platform, is expanding its engineering leadership with a Principal Engineer who will set technical direction across multiple product areas. You will own the AWS relationship, drive architectural decisions, and lead AI initiatives for software engineering, while collaborating with leadership to shape the platform for scale.

The role is based in London with a hybrid work schedule, offering significant scope to influence engineering standards,