Principal Go Engineer (£160k + benefits)

Manchester Digital; Manchester; Remote; GBP 96,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Manchester Digital is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead architecture and technical direction on client engagements. You will set AI-driven engineering standards, mentor teams, and ensure pragmatic, business-focused technical decisions for enterprise and scale-up clients.

The role emphasizes AI fluency, context engineering, and stakeholder management at CTO/CEO levels, with a remote-first culture and occasional on-site client visits.

Qualifications

• Proven track record as a principal/lead engineer on complex software projects.
• Strong hands-on experience with Go, React and AWS in distributed systems.
• Experience aligning technical decisions with business goals and client needs.

Responsibilities

• Owns architecture and technical direction on client projects.
• Mentor engineers and raise the team a level in AI-enabled engineering.
• Communicate with stakeholders up to CTO/CEO to frame technical decisions in business terms.

Skills

Go

React

AWS

Distributed systems

IaC

AI fluency

Consulting

Job description

Great opportunity for a Principal Engineer with experience of Go, React and AWS to join a software consultancy at the forefront of AI-native software engineering.

The company employs around 500 people, works with a mix of large enterprises and fast-growing scale-ups, and their engineers are already using agents to deliver quality work for clients at a pace that wasn’t possible until now.

As a Principal Engineer, you’ll be the go-to technical expert on client projects and will be responsible for architecture, technical direction and raising the level of the engineers around you.

You’ll be dealing with stakeholders up to CTO and CEO level, so you’ll need the commercial awareness to frame technical decisions in business terms and the confidence to call out when a problem isn’t a technical one.

AI is a core part of the role rather than a side skill - you’ll set AI up to succeed and treat context engineering as a craft (the right files, specs, examples and constraints), pick the right tools for the job and mentor the team in AI fluency.

The culture is pragmatic and delivery focused; they value outcomes over output, build the smallest thing that works and then iterate.

Skills

• Go, React, AWS
• Distributed systems
• Cloud (cost and security aware) and IaC
• Data pipelines, vector stores and embeddings
• AI assisted engineering (Claude Code, agents, evals)
• Consulting and stakeholder management

The money is good too – up to £160k plus benefits including remote first working with occasional time onsite with clients to build relationships in person.