Principal Software Engineer

Global Payment Holding Company; Belfast City District; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Global Payment Holding Company is seeking a Principal Software Engineer and AI thought leader to shape and drive the AI strategy across the integrated engineering organisation. You will provide technical vision, strategic direction, and practical leadership to identify and deliver AI-enabled capabilities that improve customer experiences and engineering productivity.

You will be recognised as a trusted technical authority, mentor, and change agent who promotes responsible AI, modern engineering

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's in CS, AI or related field.
• Hands-on engineering background with production software and AI products.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder storytelling skills.
• Experience implementing AI/ML ops practices including CI/CD.
• Knowledge of responsible AI, governance, privacy and ethics.
• Experience resolving performance and scalability issues.
• Experience with SOAP/RESTful web services.
• Experience in Agile Scrum or Lean Kanban environments.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead the AI strategy for the Integrated engineering organisation.
• Accelerate AI maturity through collaboration and AI communities.
• Identify, prioritise and validate high-impact AI opportunities.
• Improve engineering effectiveness through AI, automation, tooling and continuous improvement.
• Champion responsible and secure AI adoption.
• Lead AI engineering enablement with standards and reference architectures.
• Coach engineers to adopt AI-first thinking with discipline.
• Embed quality throughout the software lifecycle for AI-enabled outcomes.

Skills

AI strategy

AI leadership

CI/CD

Data governance

Performance tuning

Agile Kanban

Stakeholder management

Communication

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, or related field

Tools

SOAP

RESTful APIs

Job description

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer and AI thought leader to help define and drive the AI `strategy across the Integrted engineering organisation. This role will provide technical vision, strategic direction, and practical leadership to identify and deliver AI-enabled capabilities that improve customer experiences, accelerate engineering productivity, strengthen operational resilience, and create a competitive advantage.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will combine deep software engineering expertise with AI leadership to guide how teams adopt, evaluate, and scale AI across the software development lifecycle. You will promote responsible AI practices, modern engineering techniques, automation, Continuous Delivery, and measurable continuous improvement.

You will be recognised as a trusted technical authority, strategic advisor, mentor, and change agent who helps engineering teams adopt AI in a pragmatic, secure, and value-driven way.

What You'll Be Doing

• Help to define and lead the AI strategy for the Integrated engineering organisation, aligned to business priorities, product direction, architecture principles, security expectations, and measurable outcomes.
• Accelerate organizational AI maturity by fostering collaboration, growing internal AI communities, and expanding awareness of AI capabilities that empower teams to innovate and deliver greater impact with engineering and peers within Operations, DevOps, Security and Compliance teams
• Identify, prioritise, and validate high-impact AI opportunities across product experiences, engineering workflows, developer productivity, quality engineering, operations, support, platform modernisation, knowledge management, and partner ecosystems.
• Improve engineering effectiveness through applied AI, automation, simplification, modern tooling, and continuous improvement.
• Champion responsible and secure AI adoption, ensuring solutions account for data protection, privacy, reliability, explainability, observability, operational support, regulatory expectations, and ethical use.
• Lead AI engineering enablement by establishing standards, reusable patterns, reference architectures, evaluation approaches, knowledge-sharing forums, and mentoring practices.
• Coach and mentor engineers to adopt AI-first thinking where it improves outcomes, while maintaining strong engineering discipline, quality, and customer focus.
• Embed quality throughout the software lifecycle by promoting observable, testable, reliable, and supportable AI-enabled engineering outcomes.

What We Ask For

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field, combined with a passion for developing talent and building high-performing teams.
• Strong hands-on engineering background with experience building, deploying, and scaling production-ready software applications and AI-powered products.
• Exceptional communication, stakeholder management, and storytelling skills with the ability to influence decisions across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience implementing AI/ML operational practices, including continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), automation, data governance, or real-time data processing solutions.
• Understanding of responsible AI practices, including governance, security, privacy, risk assessment, testing, monitoring, human oversight, auditability, and safe adoption within enterprise engineering environments.
• Hands-on experience identifying and resolving performance and scalability issues across distributed application architectures and databases.
• Understanding of database design, database development, design patterns, refactoring, object-oriented design, and modern software development best practice.
• Experience with web services, including SOAP and RESTful endpoint creation and authentication schemes.
• Experience working in Agile Scrum or Lean Kanban environments, with strong analytical, problem-solving, and organisational skills.

What We'd Love You To Have

• Payments domain expertise
• Experience with Natural Language Processing (NLP), conversational AI agents, or large language model application development frameworks.
• Knowledge of cloud and data platforms