Principal Software Engineer (Backend & Platform)

Intellectual Capital Resources Ltd; West of England; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Intellectual Capital Resources Ltd on behalf of a fast-growing UK engineering and software technology company in Bristol is seeking a Principal Software Engineer. You will lead design, architecture and development of the internal developer platform used by all engineering teams, building tooling, infrastructure and workflows.

The role includes hands-on work deploying agentic AI across engineering workflows and setting guardrails, with a hybrid pattern requiring three onsite days per week in

Qualifications

• Substantial experience as a principal or staff software engineer.
• Experience building developer platforms and internal tooling.
• Hands-on experience implementing agentic AI in engineering workflows.
• Experience designing sandboxing, permissioning and audit logging for tools with elevated access.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, architecture and development of the internal developer platform used by all engineering teams.
• Architect and own tooling, infrastructure, workflows and components for developers.
• Drive implementation of agentic AI and champion its use across engineering workflows.
• Define guardrails and observability for tools operating with elevated access.

Skills

Principal/Staff Engineer

Developer platforms

Agentic AI

CI/CD

Infrastructure as Code

Kubernetes

Containers

Observability

Tools

Python

Go

Rust

AWS

Kubernetes

Job description

Our client is a fast-growing UK engineering and software technology company located in Bristol. They are looking to hire a Principal Software Engineer to lead the design, architecture and development of their internal developer platform that all their engineering teams will utilise and depend on. You will architect and own the tooling, infrastructure, workflows, and components that their developers build on. This will be a platform built from the ground up for agentic engineering- so you will lead the implementation of agentic AI and champion its use ie roll out coding agents across engineering workflows and own how and where they're used.

Key skills/experience required:

• Substantial experience as a principal or staff software engineer, with experience of utilising a range of languages/tools/frameworks (Python, Go, Rust, AWS, Kubernetes, etc)
• Demonstrable experience building developer platforms, internal tooling, and paved paths used by engineering teams.
• Hands-on experience implementing agentic AI in real engineering workflows (beyond individual experimentation).
• Experience designing the guardrails around agentic AI: sandboxing, permissioning, audit logging, or observability for tools operating with elevated access.
• Deep, hands-on experience of CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containers, and Kubernetes.
• Experience of building and deploying reproducible development environments.

Why consider it?

This is a genuinely hands-on Principal role with significant technical ownership where you can set technical direction and standards, to drive innovation.

The role is hybrid, with a minimum of 3 days per week onsite in Bristol, and candidates must be eligible for UK SC clearance.