Principal Software Engineer

Global Payments; Belfast City District; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Global Payments is seeking a Principal Software Engineer and AI thought leader to define and drive the AI strategy across the Integrated engineering organisation. You will provide technical vision, strategic direction, and practical leadership to deliver AI-enabled capabilities that improve customer experiences, accelerate productivity, and strengthen resilience.

You will promote responsible AI practices, automation, continuous delivery, and measurable improvement while guiding teams on

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in CS/AI with a passion for talent development.
• Experience building, deploying, and scaling production-ready software and AI-powered products.
• Strong communication and storytelling skills to influence technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience implementing AI/ML operational practices including CI/CD and data governance.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the AI strategy for the Integrated engineering organisation aligned to business priorities.
• Lead AI engineering enablement with standards, reusable patterns, and mentoring practices.
• Coach engineers to adopt AI-first thinking while maintaining quality and security.
• Promote responsible AI, observable and measurable outcomes across the software lifecycle.
• Collaborate with Operations, DevOps, Security and Compliance teams to accelerate AI maturity.

Skills

AI leadership

Software engineering

Strategic thinking

Mentoring

Communication

Security awareness

Education

Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science/AI

Tools

SOAP

RESTful services

CI/CD

Job description

What You’ll Be Doing

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
• Global Payments and Worldpay recently joined forces, and we’re currently operating across two Workday application systems. If you don’t see one of your applications here, it may have been submitted in the Worldpay Workday system instead.
• Click HERE to visit Worldpay Workday and view any additional applications.
• At Global Payments (NYSE : GPN), we empower simple, fast, secure payments for everyone. And to do that, we’ve built a complete, worldwide commerce ecosystem that delivers software and services at scale to millions of companies around the world—from ambitious startups to global enterprises.
• Our team of 27,000 experts is dedicated to your success. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, we're a Fortune 500® company and a member of the S&P 500 with worldwide reach spanning North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America.
• Wherever you are—or wherever you want to be—we’re there, ready to support you.
• For more information, visit company.globalpayments.com and follow Global Payments on X, LinkedIn and Facebook.

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EEOC Statement: Global Payments Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. Global Payments provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, veteran status, genetic information or any other basis protected by law. Those applicants requiring reasonable accommodation to the application and/or interview process should notify [e-mail].

Accommodations: Accessibility Requests: If you wish to request reasonable accommodations related to applying for employment or provide feedback about the accessibility of this website, please contact [e-mail]