Principal Platform Architect - API & Distributed Systems

Priority Pass; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible and hybrid working options

Work from anywhere – 8 weeks a year

Generous parental leave and family‑or‑

Career development, mentorship, and培训

Job summary

Collinson is seeking a visionary Principal Engineer to define and evolve the API platform that powers our global technology ecosystem. You will lead architectural decisions, shape scalable distributed systems, and mentor multiple engineering squads, while embracing modern practices and AI-enabled improvements.

You will work hands-on with Node.js/TypeScript, REST/GraphQL, Kafka, and cloud-native tools, driving performance, security, and observability at scale across a hybrid/remote setup.

Qualifications

• Proven experience architecting large-scale distributed systems in the cloud.
• Deep expertise in APIs, event-driven architectures, and containerised applications.
• Strong knowledge of AWS and modern DevOps practices.
• Experience leading engineering teams and influencing technical direction across squads.
• A passion for software craftsmanship, clean architecture, and scalable design.

Responsibilities

• Defining the architectural vision for our API ecosystem.
• Leading the design and development of scalable, cloud-native distributed systems.
• Building high-throughput event-driven services using Kafka.
• Driving engineering excellence across security, observability, performance, and maintainability.
• Mentoring and coaching engineers and technical leaders across multiple squads.
• Collaborating with Product, Delivery, and Engineering leadership to shape strategic technical decisions.
• Championing modern development practices including TDD, CI/CD, IaC, and automated testing.
• Exploring and embedding AI-powered engineering capabilities into our workflows and platform.

Skills

Distributed systems

APIs & event-driven

AWS & DevOps

Engineering leadership

Mentoring & coaching

Tools

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

GitHub Actions

DataDog

Salesforce integrations

Job description

Collinson is seeking a visionary Principal Engineer to define and evolve the API platform that powers our global technology ecosystem. You will lead architectural decisions, shape scalable distributed systems, and mentor multiple engineering squads, while embracing modern practices and AI-enabled improvements.

You will work hands-on with Node.js/TypeScript, REST/GraphQL, Kafka, and cloud-native tools, driving performance, security, and observability at scale across a hybrid/remote setup.