Principal Engineer (Front-End)

hastingsdirect; Leicester; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Hastings Direct is transforming how it builds and scales technology across the organisation. We’re seeking an experienced Principal Engineer (Front End) to lead engineering excellence within the CIO’s Technology Engineering function, shaping standards and driving meaningful business impact.

You will mentor engineers, own high‑priority delivery, and champion continuous learning while partnering with stakeholders to improve speed, reliability, and quality across the SDLC.

Qualifications

• Strong transformational leadership with the ability to influence decisions
• Excellent mentoring and people development capability
• Extensive experience in application and/or web development within an Agile environment

Responsibilities

• Provide line management, mentoring and feedback to engineers
• Address high-priority technical challenges and influence project direction
• Improve delivery pipeline and reuse existing platforms to maximise efficiency
• Lead the Centre of Excellence for the domain and drive best practices

Skills

Transformational leadership

Mentoring

Agile development

Tools

Jira

Octane

Azure DevOps

Jenkins

GitHub

Job description

Principal Engineer (Front End)

We’re a digital insurance provider with ambitious plans to become The Best and Biggest in the UK market. Over the past few years, we’ve made significant investments in our data and tech capabilities, particularly within our CIO function. Our CIO team is at the forefront of driving innovation and ensuring our technology infrastructure supports our ambitious goals. We’ve nurtured our 4Cs culture, fostering collaboration, creativity, and continuous improvement.

We’re proud of the journey we’re on as a company and know that our continued success will rely on the contribution of our talented colleagues. The CIO team plays a crucial role in this journey, working on cutting‑edge projects that enhance our digital presence and improve customer engagement.

We provide insurance to over four million customers, but we know there’s even bigger opportunity out there. The fact you’re now reading this job advert means we’ve tempted you to find out more about #lifeatHD - we really hope you like what you see, and you’ll join us to share in the success of the exciting chapter that lies ahead.

We understand some people may not apply for jobs unless they feel they tick every box. If you are excited about joining us and think you have some of what we’re looking for, even if you’re not 100% sure, we would love to hear from you. Our CIO team is always looking for passionate individuals who are eager to make a difference and contribute to our success.

This is a Hybrid opportunity available from our offices in Leicester or Bexhill

At Hastings Direct, we’re transforming how we build, deliver, and scale technology across the organisation. We’re looking for an experienced Principal Engineer to play a critical leadership role within our Technology Engineering function, helping shape engineering standards, drive delivery excellence, and influence enterprise wide outcomes.

This is a highly visible role, combining hands – on technical leadership, strategic influence, and people development within a fast – paced CIO environment. We are looking for a strong leader of people who can inspire high performance, coach and develop engineering talent, and set the standard for technical excellence while driving meaningful business impact.

What you’ll be doing:

As a Principal Engineer within the Technology Engineering team (CIO), you’ll play a key role in developing engineers through line management, mentoring, sponsorship, and delivering clear, constructive feedback.

You’ll be deployed to the highest – priority business challenges, quickly resolving complex issues and helping the organisation learn how to prevent them in future. You’ll provide strategic and technical input to improve project outcomes and influence the company’s direction through high – impact delivery.

Working closely with stakeholders, you’ll shape and improve the delivery pipeline by identifying gaps and leading solutions that increase speed, reliability, and consistency across the SDLC. You’ll also identify opportunities to reuse and enhance existing platforms to maximise engineering investment.

You’ll lead the Centre of Excellence for your domain, driving tooling improvements, establishing best practices and controls, and embedding continuous learning. As a recognised role model, you’ll champion high standards , link technical decisions to business impact, and foster a high –performance engineering culture.

Technical Skills & Experience Required:

What we’re looking for

• Strong transformational leadership skills, with the ability to influence decisions and implement new processes aligned to business goals
• Excellent mentoring and people development capability
• Extensive experience in application and/or web development within an Agile environment

Tools & Technologies :

• Strong experience with at least one Agile methodology (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe ) and tools such as Jira or Octane
• Expert knowledge of cloud platforms
• Advanced coding expertise in React or React native app development frameworks
• Expert use of GitHub for source control
• Strong understanding of build, release, and deployment automation
• Proven ability to design and integrate CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Azure DevOps or Jenkins
• Deep experience with continuous integration platforms (Azure DevOps, Jenkins, or equivalent)

Application Domains :

• Customer ‑ facing web and mobile e commerce
• Document templating and production systems
• Distributed ‑ tier architectures
• Web services and API ‑ driven / service ‑ oriented architectures
• Operational reporting platforms
• Desirable: Monitoring tools such as Grafana, Dynatrace, or equivalent

If you’re an experienced engineering leader who has previously managed and developed technical teams, thrives in a fast – paced environment, and is motivated by driving both people and technical excellence, we’d love to hear from you.