Principal Engineer - Transformation & Cloud Platforms

Metro Bank (UK); Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary annual bonus

Generous holiday allowance

Pension scheme

Healthcare

Life assurance

Colleague discount portal

Hybrid working

Job summary

Metro Bank (UK) is seeking a Principal Engineer to co-own a product squad with a Product Manager and set the engineering direction for payments, onboarding, lending and core banking. You will shape distributed architectures, drive cloud-native platforms, enable safe, rapid deployments and coach engineers through complex problems.

The role rewards strong technical leadership and cross-functional collaboration across the bank's technology and product teams.

Qualifications

• Significant software engineering experience with principal-level leadership in agile, product-led delivery.
• Strong architecture judgement across distributed systems and cloud-native design.
• Hands-on credibility with depth in a couple areas and breadth across modern software delivery.
• Experience with cloud platforms, IaC, CI/CD, observability and production operations.
• Ability to mentor and influence cross-functional partners.

Responsibilities

• Co-own a high-performing engineering squad with a Product Manager, making pragmatic technical decisions on scope, sequencing and approach within agreed guardrails.
• Define and evolve technical architecture across distributed systems, domain boundaries, API strategy, event-driven integration, data flows and non-functional requirements.
• Architected and scaled cloud-native platforms, enabling true continuous deployment and progressive release strategies to deliver changes safely, rapidly, and with minimal customer impact.
• Lead from the front by pairing on complex problems, reviewing critical changes, unblocking delivery and coaching engineers through real work.
• Drive engineering excellence through test automation, trunk-based development, CI/CD optimisation, secure coding, observability, service-level objectives and effective production incident response.
• Embed AI-assisted engineering practices into day-to-day delivery, including drafting, review support, test generation and traceability, while keeping human judgement and quality gates at the centre.
• Design robust third-party and vendor integration patterns, including COTS abstraction layers, bank-owned APIs, contract testing, release governance and deployment automation.
• Create an open, collaborative and inclusive engineering culture that encourages experimentation, continuous improvement and technical excellence.

Skills

Technical leadership

Distributed systems

Cloud-native architecture

Kubernetes

CI/CD

APIs & integration

AI-assisted engineering

Coaching engineers

Tools

Kafka

Kong

Databricks

Azure Kubernetes Service

React/React Native

Java

API gateways

GitHub Actions

Job description

Metro Bank (UK) is seeking a Principal Engineer to co-own a product squad with a Product Manager and set the engineering direction for payments, onboarding, lending and core banking. You will shape distributed architectures, drive cloud-native platforms, enable safe, rapid deployments and coach engineers through complex problems.

The role rewards strong technical leadership and cross-functional collaboration across the bank's technology and product teams.