Principal Tech Consultant

Parall; Leeds; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Parallax is seeking a Principal Tech Consultant in the UK to shape and deliver ambitious client engagements. You will lead technical discovery, define architectures, prototype where valuable and mentor delivery teams while leveraging AI to create real client value.

You will work closely with senior stakeholders to balance technical feasibility with business outcomes, risk, and speed, ensuring high-quality, pragmatic technology direction across projects.

Qualifications

• Significant experience designing and delivering complex production software.
• Deep software engineering knowledge with hands-on capability (TypeScript/Node.js/Next.js/React).
• Strong architecture and systems design experience balancing scalability, security, performance and cost.
• Practical AI delivery experience and understanding of Generative AI opportunities and limits.
• Strong consultancy skills: discovery, shaping proposals and stakeholder influence.
• Commercial awareness with estimation and proposals experience.
• Engineering fundamentals across testing, security, CI/CD, observability and cloud infra.
• Experience with AWS and/or Azure and infrastructure as code (Terraform or AWS CDK).
• Experience providing technical leadership and mentoring across teams, with good communication.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical shaping of complex client engagements through architecture, delivery and evolution.
• Build trusted relationships with senior client stakeholders to align objectives and decisions.
• Lead technical discovery, unpicking ambiguous requirements and turning problems into options.
• Define pragmatic architectures balancing scalability, security, performance and cost.
• Remain hands-on when valuable, prototyping, coding or reviewing approaches.
• Identify opportunities for AI within client products and advise on value.
• Guide teams in designing reliable production AI systems including observability and security.
• Collaborate with Engineering, Design, Delivery and QA to balance feasibility with outcomes.
• Provide technical leadership, mentoring, and improve decision-making across projects.
• Contribute to estimates, discovery engagements and proposals.

Skills

Software design

Architecture

AI in practice

Consultancy skills

Commercial awareness

Engineering fundamentals

Cloud infrastructure

IaC (Terraform / AWS CDK)

Leadership & mentoring

Tools

Terraform

AWS CDK

Job description

About the role

At Parallax, we celebrate the curious. The people who love getting stuck into difficult problems, understanding what really matters and using technology to create meaningful outcomes.

We're looking for a Principal Tech Consultant to help shape and deliver some of our most ambitious client engagements.

This is a senior, hands-on technical consultancy role. You'll work with clients to understand complex business and technology challenges, create clarity where the answer isn't obvious, and shape pragmatic solutions that balance technical quality, user needs, commercial value, risk and speed.

You’ll often be involved from the earliest stages of an engagement: leading technical discovery, exploring opportunities, evaluating different approaches and helping turn an idea or problem into a clear technical direction. You'll act as a trusted adviser to senior client stakeholders, constructively challenging assumptions and helping them make informed decisions about their products, platforms and technology strategy.

You’ll remain close to delivery too. Depending on the engagement, that could mean defining architecture, prototyping an idea, writing critical parts of a system, reviewing code, resolving complex technical challenges or supporting a squad to make good technical decisions. The impact of the role goes beyond the code you personally write: you'll create the conditions for others to deliver excellent work.

AI is an important part of both what we build and how we work. We're building AI-native products and helping clients understand where AI can create genuine value, but we also expect our consultants to use AI effectively in their own workflows — accelerating research, development, analysis, prototyping and problem-solving while applying appropriate judgement and oversight.

As a Principal, you'll also have an impact beyond individual projects. You'll help grow client relationships, contribute to discovery, proposals, estimates and Statements of Work, mentor others and raise technical standards across Parallax.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the technical shaping of complex client engagements, from early conversations and discovery through architecture, delivery and ongoing evolution.

• Build trusted relationships with senior client stakeholders, understanding their wider business objectives and helping them make informed product and technology decisions.

• Lead technical discovery and consultancy activities, asking the right questions, unpicking ambiguous requirements, identifying dependencies and turning complex problems into clear options and recommendations.

• Define pragmatic technical architectures and approaches that balance scalability, security, maintainability, performance, cost, delivery constraints and the capabilities of the team.

• Remain hands-on where it adds value, whether through prototyping, writing critical production code, solving difficult technical problems, reviewing implementation approaches or supporting teams through complex delivery challenges.

• Identify and shape opportunities for AI within client products and organisations, advising on where technologies such as LLMs, agents and automation can create genuine value and where a simpler approach may be more appropriate.

• Guide teams in designing reliable production AI systems, considering areas such as evaluation, context, model choice, observability, security, latency, cost and non-deterministic behaviour.

• Work closely with Engineering, Experience Design, Delivery, QA and other disciplines to ensure solutions balance technical feasibility with user, business and commercial outcomes.

• Provide technical leadership across project teams, mentoring others, improving decision-making and helping teams maintain high standards without becoming a bottleneck.

• Contribute to estimates, discovery engagements, proposals, pitches and Statements of Work, helping us define solutions that are both technically credible and commercially viable.

• Look beyond the immediate brief to understand a client’s broader challenges, identify opportunities to create additional value and help develop long-term client relationships.

• Help evolve technical standards and practices across Parallax, sharing learning between projects and encouraging pragmatic approaches to architecture, engineering quality, testing, security, DevOps and cloud infrastructure.

• Represent Parallax confidently with clients and, where appropriate, through events, workshops, written content and other thought leadership.

About You

You're an experienced technical leader who enjoys solving complex problems and understands that the best technical solution starts with understanding the right problem.

You're comfortable moving between client workshops, architecture discussions and a codebase. You can form a clear point of view, explain technical trade-offs and adapt your communication to engineers, product teams and senior stakeholders.

You combine strong technical judgement with commercial awareness and curiosity. You enjoy developing others, challenge assumptions constructively and are excited by the potential of AI while remaining pragmatic about where and how it should be used.

Key Skills

What you need to have

• Significant experience designing and delivering complex production software, ideally in a consultancy, agency or varied client-facing environment.

• Deep software engineering knowledge and the ability to remain hands-on with modern technologies. We commonly work with TypeScript, Node.js, Next.js and React, but strong engineering fundamentals matter more than a specific stack.

• Strong architecture and systems-design experience, balancing factors such as scalability, integration, security, performance, maintainability and cost.

• Strong practical experience using AI as part of your day-to-day technical workflow, alongside experience delivering production AI applications and understanding the opportunities and limitations of modern Generative AI.

• Strong consultancy skills: able to structure ambiguous problems, lead technical discovery and workshops, influence senior stakeholders and turn complexity into clear recommendations.

• Commercial awareness, with experience contributing to estimation, solution shaping, proposals or Statements of Work and identifying opportunities to create further client value.

• Strong engineering fundamentals across testing, security, code quality, CI/CD, observability and cloud infrastructure.

• Experience with AWS and/or Azure and infrastructure as code such as Terraform or AWS CDK.

• Experience providing technical leadership and mentoring others, alongside excellent communication, emotional intelligence and adaptability.

Nice to haves

Don't worry if you don't have all of the following — we'd still like to hear from you:

• Experience helping organisations identify and implement opportunities for AI transformation.

• Deep experience with production LLM applications, such as evaluation, RAG, agentic systems, context engineering, tool use or AI observability.