Principal Lead Engineer - AI-Driven System Architect

New Look; Greater London; On-site; GBP 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

New Look is seeking a Principal Lead to provide technical leadership across SAP, DevOps, Domain Services, Storefront, iOS and Android. You will partner with Capability Leads, Architecture, and Engineering Manager to embed best practices, plan with guardrails, and drive secure, observable software delivery.

You will champion agentic development, moving teams toward AI-assisted planning, building, testing and reviewing changes under human oversight, with a focus on sustainment of standards beyond

Qualifications

• Extensive experience as a Principal / Staff-level engineer or engineering lead within enterprise commerce, cloud and DevOps.
• Proven ability to define and embed engineering standards across multiple teams including third parties.
• Hands-on experience introducing agentic development and AI-assisted SDLC governance.

Responsibilities

• Define, build and embed best-of-breed engineering practices across six capabilities: SAP, DevOps, Domain Services, Storefront, iOS and Android.
• Act as senior escalation point to unblock engineers and leads.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership as a full-stack engineer in collaboration with Capability Leads and Architecture team.
• Lead adoption of agentic development practices across the engineering organisation from planning to release with human oversight.
• Define guardrails for agentic/AI-assisted engineering, including tools like GitHub Copilot and data protection.

Skills

Enterprise commerce (SAP)

Cloud & DevOps

Backend services

Web storefront

iOS & Android

Engineering standards

AI-assisted development

SDLC methodologies

CI/CD

Infrastructure as code

Automated testing

Security controls

Observability

DORA metrics

Data contracts

Jira

Confluence

Azure DevOps

GitHub

Retail / omnichannel

Tools

Jira

Confluence

Azure DevOps

GitHub

Job description

New Look is seeking a Principal Lead to provide technical leadership across SAP, DevOps, Domain Services, Storefront, iOS and Android. You will partner with Capability Leads, Architecture, and Engineering Manager to embed best practices, plan with guardrails, and drive secure, observable software delivery.

You will champion agentic development, moving teams toward AI-assisted planning, building, testing and reviewing changes under human oversight, with a focus on sustainment of standards beyond