Principal Engineer - Cloud, AI, and Platform Leadership

Metro Bank; England; Hybrid; GBP 100,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Discretionary annual bonus

Generous holiday allowance

Pension scheme

Healthcare

Life assurance

Colleague discount portal

Job summary

Metro Bank is recruiting a senior engineering leader to co-own a high-performing squad and drive pragmatic technical decisions. You will shape architecture across distributed systems, APIs and data flows, while scaling cloud-native platforms for safe, rapid releases.

The role blends hands-on credibility with mentorship, promoting secure, observable, and auditable services in a regulated bank environment. You will lead with an emphasis on AI-assisted engineering, modern toolchains, and strong

Qualifications

• Significant software engineering experience in agile, product-led or squad-based delivery.
• Strong architectural judgment across distributed systems, APIs and cloud-native design.
• Hands-on credibility with depth in one or two areas and breadth across modern delivery.

Responsibilities

• Co-own a high-performing engineering squad and decide on scope and approach.
• Define and evolve architecture across distributed systems, APIs and data flows.
• Architect cloud-native platforms enabling safe, rapid change with minimal customer impact.
• Lead by pairing on complex problems and coaching engineers.
• Drive engineering excellence with test automation, CI/CD, observability and secure coding.
• Embed AI-assisted practices into delivery while maintaining human oversight.
• Design third-party and vendor integration patterns with governance and deployment automation.
• Foster an open, collaborative engineering culture focused on continuous improvement.

Skills

Technical leadership

Architecture judgment

Collaborative coaching

Communication

Tools

GitHub Actions

Kafka

Kong

Databricks

Azure Kubernetes Service

React

React Native

Java

Automated testing

API gateways

Job description

Metro Bank is recruiting a senior engineering leader to co-own a high-performing squad and drive pragmatic technical decisions. You will shape architecture across distributed systems, APIs and data flows, while scaling cloud-native platforms for safe, rapid releases.

The role blends hands-on credibility with mentorship, promoting secure, observable, and auditable services in a regulated bank environment. You will lead with an emphasis on AI-assisted engineering, modern toolchains, and strong