Principal Software Engineer

Albany Partners; Reading; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Albany Growth is partnering with a software business undergoing a major technology transformation. We are hiring a Principal Software Engineer to stay hands-on while shaping how to rebuild a large legacy product estate for a cloud-native future.

The role is heavily focused on C# / .NET development, cloud-native services, and AI-assisted engineering across the development lifecycle. You will work in Reading on a hybrid model and influence architectural direction while remaining technically

Qualifications

• Hands-on principal/lead engineer with recent C#/.NET experience.
• Experience modernising large legacy apps and moving to cloud.
• Experience with AI-assisted engineering tools and approaches.

Responsibilities

• Write and review C# / .NET code in a cloud-native context.
• Refactor legacy functionality into modular microservices.
• Collaborate with Product to define technical solutions.
• Define engineering patterns, testing standards, and guardrails.

Skills

C# / .NET

Azure

Microservices

APIs

AI-assisted engineering

Distributed systems

Automated testing

Hands-on coding

Lead-level engineering

Job description

Reading - Hybrid (ideally 2/3 days per week)

Albany Growth are partnered with an established software business going through a major multi-year technology transformation, rebuilding and modernising a large legacy product estate onto a new cloud-native architecture.

They're hiring a Principal Software Engineer to play a key role in that journey - someone who is still deeply hands-on, comfortable getting into an existing codebase, understanding how it works today and helping shape how that capability should be rebuilt for the future.

This is a software engineering role first and foremost, NOT a DevOps or infrastructure position. You'll be building applications in the cloud, modernising legacy products and helping shape how AI and agentic engineering is applied across the software development lifecycle.

What you'll be doing:

• Remaining heavily hands-on with C# / .NET development
• Reviewing complex legacy applications and understanding how existing functionality should evolve
• Breaking functionality out of legacy platforms and rebuilding it incrementally on the target cloud architecture
• Working closely with Product to turn business requirements into well-defined technical solutions
• Building cloud-native, scalable application services and APIs
• Helping define engineering patterns, testing standards and technical guardrails
• Applying AI-assisted and agentic engineering approaches across the development lifecycle
• Strong commercial experience with C# and .NET / .NET Core
• Principal, Staff or Lead-level engineers who still spend the majority of their time building
• Strong experience developing applications in Azure, although AWS or GCP backgrounds can also work
• Experience modernising large legacy applications or progressively moving functionality from on-premise systems into the cloud
• Strong knowledge of microservices, distributed systems, APIs and automated testing
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted or agentic software engineering, using tools or approaches such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, MCP, coding agents or similar
• Experience helping introduce or scale AI-enabled engineering practices across a development team would be particularly valuable
• Java experience is useful but not essential

Reading - couple of days a week onsite

Opportunity to help shape agentic engineering across the development lifecycle

This is a great fit for senior engineers who don't want to move away from coding and enjoy taking complex legacy software, understanding what should stay, what should change and what should be rebuilt - then actually delivering it.