Principal Engineer - Hands-on High-Throughput Systems

twentyAI; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

twentyAI in London seeks a Principal Engineer to stay hands-on while shaping the architecture and technical direction of high-throughput financial platforms. You will design backend services in Java, drive distributed systems, and champion best practices across teams.

You will lead technical design discussions, own complex initiatives from concept to production, and collaborate with product, architecture, security and operations to enhance observability, reliability and performance.

Qualifications

• Significant commercial software engineering experience in complex production environments.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and scalable design.
• Experience with Kafka and event-driven architectures.
• Experience designing microservices, APIs and integration patterns.
• Strong Kubernetes experience in production environments.
• Knowledge of CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, GitOps and automated delivery.
• Security-focused development including authentication and authorization.
• Able to own technical initiatives and drive architecture decisions.
• Observability and production monitoring experience.
• Hybrid working environment and ability to influence stakeholders.
• Exposure to Python, Scala, OpenShift, Docker or Helm would be beneficial.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop backend applications and services within a Java environment.
• Build and enhance distributed systems operating at high throughput and availability.
• Design event-driven architectures and integrations using Kafka.
• Shape technical approaches and contribute to architecture and engineering standards.
• Lead technical design discussions and drive complex initiatives from concept through to production.
• Build scalable APIs, microservices and integration patterns.
• Develop and operate applications across Kubernetes and containerised environments.
• Contribute to CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, GitOps and deployment automation.
• Work closely with engineering, product, architecture, security and operational teams.
• Investigate complex performance, resilience and production issues.
• Improve observability, maintainability and engineering practices across the platform.

Skills

Distributed systems

Kafka

Microservices

APIs

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Infrastructure as Code

GitOps

Security

Architecture decisions

Observability

Stakeholder influence

Python/Scala

OpenShift

Docker

Education

Degree in computer science or engineering

Tools

OpenShift

Docker

Helm

Job description

twentyAI in London seeks a Principal Engineer to stay hands-on while shaping the architecture and technical direction of high-throughput financial platforms. You will design backend services in Java, drive distributed systems, and champion best practices across teams.

You will lead technical design discussions, own complex initiatives from concept to production, and collaborate with product, architecture, security and operations to enhance observability, reliability and performance.