Principal Engineer — Transformation & Cloud-Native Banking

Metro Bank Plc; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working

Competitive salary

Discretionary annual bonus

Pension scheme

Healthcare

Life assurance

Colleague discount portal

Job summary

Metro Bank plc seeks a Principal Engineer to lead a product squad, co-owning delivery with a Product Manager. You will set engineering direction for payments, onboarding, lending, and core banking, shaping architecture and cloud-native platforms for safe, frequent releases.

You will collaborate across squads, drive best practices in CI/CD, observability, and security, and embed AI-enabled engineering techniques with strong governance.

Qualifications

• Significant software engineering experience in agile, product-led or squad-based delivery.
• Strong judgement across distributed systems, APIs, event streaming and cloud-native design.
• Hands-on credibility with depth in one area and breadth across frontend, backend, data and infra.
• Deep experience with cloud-native platforms, Kubernetes, IaC, CI/CD, and observability.
• Confidence using AI-enabled engineering tools while ensuring human oversight.
• Proven ability to build secure, observable, resilient services in regulated environments.
• Clear communication and coaching skills for cross-team collaboration.
• Familiarity with modern toolchains like GitHub Actions, Kafka, Kong, Databricks, AKS, React, Java.

Responsibilities

• Co-own a high-performing engineering squad with a Product Manager and set technical direction.
• Define and evolve architecture across distributed systems and API strategy.
• Architect and scale cloud-native platforms enabling safe, rapid delivery.
• Lead by pairing on complex problems and coaching engineers.
• Drive engineering excellence with testing, CI/CD, security, observability and incident response.
• Embed AI-assisted engineering practices while retaining human judgement and quality gates.
• Design robust third-party and vendor integration patterns with governance and automation.
• Foster an open, collaborative engineering culture focused on experimentation and improvement.

Skills

Principal leadership

Cloud-native architecture

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Microservices

API gateways

Observability

Distributed systems

AI-assisted engineering

Team coaching

Security & compliance

GitHub Actions

Kafka

Kong

Databricks

Azure Kubernetes Service

React/Java

Tools

GitHub Actions

Kafka

Kong

Databricks

Azure Kubernetes Service

Job description

Metro Bank plc seeks a Principal Engineer to lead a product squad, co-owning delivery with a Product Manager. You will set engineering direction for payments, onboarding, lending, and core banking, shaping architecture and cloud-native platforms for safe, frequent releases.

You will collaborate across squads, drive best practices in CI/CD, observability, and security, and embed AI-enabled engineering techniques with strong governance.