Principal Software Engineer - AI-Driven Platform & CI/CD

The Citation Group; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

The Citation Group is seeking an hands-on software engineer to drive a platform transformation in the UK. You will join a squad that underpins a shift to CI/CD, team-owned components, and AI-enhanced development. You will influence quality, architecture, and delivery across the full stack.

You'll work with a Tech Lead to evolve practices, improve observability, and embed secure coding and testing as standard. Collaboration and growth are core to the role.

Qualifications

• Proven ability to deliver complex features on production systems.
• Experience across backend and frontend with databases and cloud.
• Practical CI/CD, automated testing, and IaC experience.
• Experience using AI as part of engineering workflow.

Responsibilities

• Write production-grade code across backend, frontend, and infra.
• Own features from design to deployment in increments.
• Contribute to architecture discussions with practical input.
• Run spikes and PoCs to evaluate approaches.
• Manage technical debt responsibly.
• Decompose shared services into team-owned components.
• Support move to CI/CD and trunk-based development.
• Build with observability: instrumentation, logging, monitoring.

Skills

Full-stack development

CI/CD pipelines

Cloud platforms

Docker/Kubernetes

AI in engineering workflows

Security fundamentals

Code quality & testing

Collaboration

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

CI/CD tooling

Job description

The Citation Group is seeking an hands-on software engineer to drive a platform transformation in the UK. You will join a squad that underpins a shift to CI/CD, team-owned components, and AI-enhanced development. You will influence quality, architecture, and delivery across the full stack.

You'll work with a Tech Lead to evolve practices, improve observability, and embed secure coding and testing as standard. Collaboration and growth are core to the role.