Principal Software Engineer: Tech Strategy & Delivery Leader

Hippo Digital Limited; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Contributory Pension Scheme

25 Days Holiday plus UK Public Holiday

Perkbox access

Critical illness cover

Life assurance and death in service

Volunteer days

Cycle-to-work scheme

Salary sacrifice electric vehicles

Season ticket loans

Wellbeing sessions

Private health cover

Private dental cover

Additional company pension contributes

Additional holidays (up to 2 days)

Job summary

Hippo Digital Limited is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to guide multiple squads and shape the technical direction of complex digital services. You will act as a strategic leader across engineering, delivery and data, driving best practices and high-quality, scalable solutions.

You will oversee architecture, CI/CD maturity, and secure, cloud-native platforms, mentoring senior engineers and partnering with stakeholders to deliver transformative outcomes for public and private sector

Qualifications

• Mastery of multiple modern programming languages and extensive engineering experience across diverse technology stacks (Python, Java, Node, etc.)
• Expert track record of leading multiple delivery teams to deliver enterprise-scale, high-quality, and technology-agnostic solutions.
• Strategic mastery in coaching and guiding senior engineers and leads to achieve optimal results.
• Exceptional verbal/written communication skills, with the ability to influence both technical and executive audiences.
• Expert knowledge of the full development lifecycle for user-centred digital solutions at scale.
• Advanced expertise in architectural strategies and technical roadmaps across diverse and complex environments.
• Expert level experience with containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes) and complex Microservices architectures.
• Strategic design of system integrations and large-scale application architectures.
• Mastery of agile methodologies and their application across large, distributed teams.
• Enterprise-level expertise in Infrastructure as Code and public cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Strategy-level experience with CI/CD tools and automation at an organisational level.

Responsibilities

• Provide strategic technical guidance across multiple squads as a high-level SME to ensure user-centred software follows best practice.
• Partner with senior stakeholders to explore, design and deliver innovative solutions to the most complex client problems.
• Oversee and optimise the design and management of complex software development and deployment pipelines, removing strategic bottlenecks.
• Direct the prioritisation of multi-team workloads, ensuring alignment with high-level operational priorities and complex work-streams.
• Act as a high-level communicator and presenter, representing Hippo’s technical vision to executive stakeholders.
• Drive strategic relationships with key stakeholders, ensuring that systemic engineering challenges are overcome.
• Drive the recruitment strategy for engineering and lead high-level professional development, coaching, and succession planning.
• Champion Hippo’s Engineering Herd globally through thought leadership, workshops, and industry conferences.

Skills

Python

Java

Node.js

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Hippo Digital Limited is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to guide multiple squads and shape the technical direction of complex digital services. You will act as a strategic leader across engineering, delivery and data, driving best practices and high-quality, scalable solutions.

You will oversee architecture, CI/CD maturity, and secure, cloud-native platforms, mentoring senior engineers and partnering with stakeholders to deliver transformative outcomes for public and private sector