Principle Engineer (Platform & Engineering Enablement)

Burberry; London; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading company in luxury fashion is seeking a Principal Engineer to serve as a technical partner in their Digital ecosystem. This role involves overseeing backend and infrastructure strategy, mentoring engineers, and working closely with cross-functional teams to enhance engineering practices and capabilities.

Qualifications

• Experience as a Principal or Staff Engineer in a cloud-native environment.
• Strong backend knowledge in Node.js with CI/CD tools.
• Proven track record of mentoring and managing engineers.

Responsibilities

• Act as subject matter expert on platform and backend engineering.
• Lead technical design discussions and reviews across teams.
• Manage a small platform team including line management.

Skills

Backend engineering

Cloud-native experience

AWS

Node.js

CI/CD

Mentoring

Communication

Job description

Select how often (in days) to receive an alert:

Department: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

City: London

Location: GB

INTRODUCTION

JOB PURPOSE

The Principal Engineer will act as a technical thought partner and knowledge anchor for platform engineering across our Digital ecosystem. You will own key aspects of our backend and infrastructure strategy, advise delivery and architecture teams, and ensure continuity and clarity in how our platforms evolve.

The role is ideal for someone who thrives on variety - from setting direction and reviewing technical designs, to mentoring engineers and shaping ways of working. This role also calls on people leadership responsibilities and the ability to work closely with external delivery teams and other parts of technology (security, DR, DPO etc.)

You will help create clarity in complex environments, promote reusability and resilience, and ensure that engineering knowledge is retained and used effectively across the organisation.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Act as the internal subject matter expert on platform and backend engineering, with oversight of cloud infrastructure, APIs, and deployment pipelines.
• Lead technical design discussions and reviews across product teams and delivery workstreams.
• Partner with DevOps, Security, Architecture, and Delivery to ensure that our engineering practices are robust, scalable, and aligned.
• Manage a small platform team covering ecommerce, customer and other key business capabilities including line management of 1-2 internal engineers and a QA Manager.
• Promote consistent use of tooling, automation, and observability to increase reliability and reduce manual overhead.
• Foster strong relationships with engineers, product managers, architects, and other technical leaders to encourage shared ownership and technical excellence.
• Guide prioritisation of tech debt, internal tooling, and engineering enablement work.
• Provide coaching and informal leadership to technical leads and engineers, helping to build an engaged, high-performing engineering culture.
• Contribute to internal hiring and assessment processes to ensure we bring in and grow the right capabilities.
• Support the evolution of delivery models and team structures with a focus on knowledge continuity and internal capability uplift.

PERSONAL PROFILE

• Proven experience as a Principal or Staff Engineer in a cloud-native environment, ideally with strong exposure to AWS (Lambda, Fargate, CDK/Terraform, etc.).
• Deep backend engineering knowledge, particularly using Node.js or similar, with strong CI/CD experience (e.g. GitLab, Snyk).
• Demonstrated ability to work with cross-functional teams and influence technical outcomes across multiple domains.
• Comfortable operating across ambiguous or evolving delivery contexts, providing structure and direction when needed.
• Experienced in mentoring and/or managing engineers, and able to adapt your leadership style to different team needs.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills - able to convey technical issues clearly and constructively.
• Strong bias for simplification, enablement, and continuous improvement.
• Experience with distributed teams and multi-vendor environments is a plus.

Burberry is an Equal Opportunities Employer and as such, treats all applications equally and recruits purely on the basis of skills and experience.

Job Segment: Engineer, QA, Quality Assurance, Engineering, Quality, Technology