Principal Software Engineer

loveholidays; Greater London; On-site; GBP 85,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading travel technology company in Greater London is seeking a Principal Engineer to drive technical excellence and coach engineering teams. You will own functional KPIs and enable mission teams to deliver innovative solutions. The ideal candidate has strong front-end skills and experience with AI-powered feature development, contributing to an exciting technological environment. This role offers competitive benefits including a 5% pension contribution and 25 days of holidays.

Benefits

Company pension contributions at 5%

Individualised training budget

Discounted holidays

25 days of holidays per annum

Ability to buy and sell annual leave

Cycle to work scheme

Qualifications

• Experience with AI-powered feature development and software delivery.
• Demonstrable history of solving complex technical challenges.
• Ability to connect technical excellence to business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Own the team’s functional KPIs and define measurable outcomes.
• Coach engineers and guide their growth.
• Embed in mission teams to solve hard tech problems.

Skills

AI-powered feature development

Hands-on collaboration

Building scalable websites

Facilitating technical discussions

Identifying successful technical patterns

Job description

Why Technology at loveholidays?

At loveholidays - we trailblaze together. We’re on a mission to open the world to everyone, giving our customers’ unlimited choice, unmatched ease and unmissable value for their next getaway. Our team is the driving force behind our role as our customers’ personal holiday expert - the smart way to get away.

Technology at loveholidays underpins our vision to become the most loved OTA in Europe. We drive cutting‑edge innovation and technical excellence to futureproof the business. Our systems process trillions of daily holiday offers, we deploy over a thousand times a month, serving thousands of requests per second. This is where you can accelerate your growth by solving complex challenges and broadening your skillset.

Join us to create impact for our future in an exciting new chapter, owning your success and contributing to shared goals. We actively talk about technology and adhere to our key technology principles that have guided us this far. We are growing and have ambitious plans to expand across Europe, employing the best minds and technology to let us do this.

The impact you’ll have:

As a Principal Engineer in the Boost team, you’ll be part of a group of principal engineers who champion technical excellence. The team acts as an enabling function, not a delivery arm. You will embed in other teams to help them improve and work faster. You will be hands‑on, leading by example, and coaching others to drive technical excellence and innovation across the company. Your success will be measured by how you help others succeed.

Your responsibilities include:

• Own the team’s functional KPIs, defining the measurable outcomes that show our impact.
• Help mission teams deliver faster, safer solutions by solving complex problems and training others to do the same.
• Champion AI adoption, applying it to both engineering processes and solutions.
• Coach our engineers, guiding their growth.
• Build tools to make the Boost team more effective and improve platform governance.

We are looking for a candidate with strong front‑end skills. You will work across the various tech systems within our platform and be confident in your ability to quickly learn new technologies. We value an agile mindset, and a proven track record of delivery with teams.

Blog posts:

• How loveholidays is solving the technical excellence paradox
• Your AI Hates Your Prompts (And So Do You)
• Stop Chasing Ghost Errors: A Systematic Approach to Frontend Error Monitoring That Actually Works
• Does website speed contribute to customers booking holidays online?
• Creating a Zero Surprises Culture

Open source contributions:

• github.com/loveholidays/ripley
• github.com/loveholidays/phrasebook
• github.com/loveholidays/po-test
• github.com/loveholidays/mcp-html-share

As part of our tech culture, we continuously improve our time to deliver, reduce errors, and generally leave things better than we found them.

Your day to day:

• Embed in mission teams to solve hard tech problems, coaching engineers hands‑on to instill our core engineering principles.
• Drive initiatives to apply AI to build better solutions and improve our engineering process.
• Build tooling and processes to accelerate and enable our platform development.
• Design and oversee impactful systems that run reliably at cloud scale.
• Write and speak about our tech work to raise our engineering profile.

Your skillset:

• Experience with AI‑powered feature development and leveraging AI tooling for software delivery, with enthusiasm for transforming how we build and deliver software.
• Demonstrable history of working hands‑on with engineering teams to solve complex technical challenges, building team capabilities and promoting sustainable practices.
• Seasoned facilitator who excels at pairing with engineers, leading technical discussions, and helping teams navigate architectural decisions through practical, hands‑on collaboration.
• Ability to identify and scale successful technical patterns while connecting technical excellence to measurable business outcomes.
• A track record of building and optimising scalable, high‑performance websites.

Perks of joining us:

• Company pension contributions at 5%.
• Individualised training budget for you to learn on the job and level yourself up.
• Discounted holidays for you, your family and friends.
• 25 days of holidays per annum (plus 8 public holidays) increases by 1 day for every second year of service, up to a maximum 30 days per annum.
• Ability to buy and sell annual leave.
• Cycle to work scheme, season ticket loan and eye care vouchers.

At loveholidays, we focus on developing an inclusive culture and environment that encourages personal growth and collective success. Each individual offers unique perspectives and ideas that increase the diversity and effectiveness of our teams. And we value the insight and potential you could bring on our continued journey.

The interview journey:

1. 1st stage interview with a member of our Talent Team
2. Introduction to loveholidays Engineering with our VP of Engineering (60 mins)
3. Presentation/Case Study with our VP and CTO (60 mins)
4. Technical interview with 2 of our Principal or Heads of Engineering (60 mins)