Principal Software Engineer: Tech Strategy Leader

Hippo; Manchester; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Contributory Pension

25 Days Holiday

Perkbox access

Private health cover

Cycle-to-work

Job summary

Hippo is a fast-growing digital consultancy delivering transformative digital solutions across public and private sectors in the UK. We seek a Principal Software Engineer to shape technical direction, lead multiple squads, and drive innovation across the engineering community.

You will partner with stakeholders, oversee complex pipelines, and champion best practices in CI/CD and cloud architectures, enabling scalable, secure platforms for clients.

Qualifications

• Experience leading multiple delivery teams on enterprise-scale projects.
• Expertise across Python, Java, Node, and other stacks.
• Strong communication to influence technical and executive audiences.
• Experience with cloud architectures and infrastructure as code.
• Experience with microservices and containerisation.

Responsibilities

• Provide strategic technical guidance across multiple squads as a high-level SME.
• Partner with senior stakeholders to design and deliver innovative solutions.
• Oversee and optimise complex software development and deployment pipelines.
• Prioritise multi-team workloads in line with high-level priorities.
• Represent Hippo’s technical vision to executive stakeholders as a communicator.
• Drive strategic relationships with key stakeholders and resolve engineering challenges.
• Lead engineering recruitment strategy and professional development.
• Champion Hippo’s Engineering Herd through thought leadership and events.

Skills

Leadership

Communication

Architectural design

Agile methodologies

Cloud architecture

System integration

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD pipelines

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

Hippo is a fast-growing digital consultancy delivering transformative digital solutions across public and private sectors in the UK. We seek a Principal Software Engineer to shape technical direction, lead multiple squads, and drive innovation across the engineering community.

You will partner with stakeholders, oversee complex pipelines, and champion best practices in CI/CD and cloud architectures, enabling scalable, secure platforms for clients.