Principal Engineer - VP - £160k + Bonus

Bourne Search Ltd; Greater London; Presencial; GBP 120.000 - 180.000; Jornada completa

Descripción de la vacante

Bourne Search Ltd. is seeking a Principal Engineer to drive technical direction and architecture for complex software platforms at a major metals trading exchange.

You will lead hands-on engineering, mentor teams, and shape security, scalability and reliability while delivering business-critical capabilities. The role requires deep experience with Java, microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures (Kafka) and cloud-native development using Kubernetes, plus strong DevOps practices and

Conocimientos

Java

Microservices

APIs

Kafka

Cloud-native

Kubernetes

DevOps

CI/CD

Security by design

SRE

Herramientas

Prometheus

Grafana

Splunk

OpenTelemetry

Elastic

Descripción del empleo

A globally recognised exchange and clearing house at the centre of industrial metals trading. The business operates three trading platforms totalling $18 trillion in annual volume, 178 million lots and 4 billion tonnes, with significant global physical warehouse operations across 15 countries. The Pricing Technology team develops and supports the systems that generate and distribute global reference prices and implement volatility controls across the trading venues. These systems are critical to the operation of the Exchange.

PURPOSE OF ROLE

The Principal Engineer is a senior individual contributor responsible for driving the technical direction, architecture, design and delivery of complex software platforms and applications. The role provides leadership through hands-on software engineering, technical expertise, mentoring and influence across teams, without direct people management responsibility. Success means building secure, scalable and resilient software systems, establishing engineering best practices, improving developer productivity and enabling efficient delivery of business-critical capabilities.

REQUIRED EXPERIENCE

• Significant hands-on software engineering experience in Java, building and operating distributed systems
• Deep experience with microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures (Kafka) and integration patterns
• Ability to define and influence engineering strategy, architecture standards and technical roadmaps
• Design and build secure, cloud-native applications using modern engineering practices (Kubernetes)
• Strong knowledge of secure software development including authentication, authorisation, encryption and secure-by-design principles
• Experience with Kubernetes, container platforms and scalable production environments
• Practical DevOps expertise across CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, GitOps, automated testing and deployment automation
• Ability to lead technical design discussions, conduct reviews and make pragmatic engineering decisions
• Proven ability to work autonomously and drive initiatives from concept to delivery
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, influencing technical and non-technical audiences

BONUS KNOWLEDGE

• Experience in financial services, trading systems or other regulated environments
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practice
• Observability tooling: Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, OpenTelemetry, Elastic

PERSONAL QUALITIES

• Analytical and pragmatic problem solver focused on outcomes, resiliency and maintainability
• Strong ownership mentality with the ability to independently lead technical initiatives
• Collaborative and influential, building trust across engineering, product, operations, security and business stakeholders
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to promote engineering best practices, drive continuous improvement and share technical knowledge effectively

SENIORITY & SCOPE

The successful candidate will act as a subject matter expert, providing technical leadership, defining engineering standards, influencing strategic technology direction and supporting complex delivery initiatives across the organisation. Incumbents at this level possess significant engineering and industry expertise and are recognised technical leaders capable of influencing architecture, security, reliability, platform strategy, software delivery practices and long-term technology decisions across multiple domains.