Principal Platform Engineer: Cloud & Architecture Leader

HKEX Technology (Shenzhen) Limited; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

The Principal Engineer at HKEX Technology (Shenzhen) Limited is a senior individual contributor driving the technical direction, architecture, design, and delivery of complex software platforms and applications. You will lead through hands-on engineering, provide mentoring, and influence across teams without direct people management responsibility.

Success means building secure, scalable, and resilient systems, establishing engineering best practices, and improving developer productivity to

Qualifications

• 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.
• 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 both technical and non-technical audiences.

Responsibilities

• Drive the technical direction, architecture, design, and delivery of complex software platforms and applications.
• Provide leadership through hands-on software engineering, mentoring, and influence across teams.
• Establish engineering best practices to improve developer productivity and system resilience.
• Lead technical design discussions, reviews, and pragmatic engineering decisions.

Skills

Java

Distributed systems

Microservices

Kafka

Kubernetes

CI/CD

DevOps

Security-by-design

Stakeholder management

Communication

Education

University degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Tools

OpenShift

Docker

Kubernetes

Helm

Prometheus

Grafana

Splunk

OpenTelemetry

Elastic

Job description

The Principal Engineer at HKEX Technology (Shenzhen) Limited is a senior individual contributor driving the technical direction, architecture, design, and delivery of complex software platforms and applications. You will lead through hands-on engineering, provide mentoring, and influence across teams without direct people management responsibility.

Success means building secure, scalable, and resilient systems, establishing engineering best practices, and improving developer productivity to