Principal Engineer - AI (UCX Platform), VP

NatWest Group; Chennai District; On-site; INR 3,200,000 - 6,500,000; Full time

Job summary

NatWest Group in Chennai, India seeks a Principal Engineer to shape software design with a customer-centric focus. You will drive architecture, engineering excellence and scalable solutions across platforms and services, collaborating with cross-functional teams to raise the bank's software engineering capabilities.

You will mentor engineers, implement automation for build/test/deploy workflows, and ensure secure, high-performance outcomes aligned to business goals.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in software engineering and architecture within DevOps and Agile environments.
• Strong mastery of Python or Java backend engineering.
• Hands-on experience with AI/ML tooling, AWS services, and scalable systems.

Responsibilities

• Defining, creating and providing oversight and governance of engineering and design solutions with a focus on end-to-end automation, simplification, resilience, security, performance, scalability and reusability
• Working within a platform or feature team along with software engineers to design and engineer complex software, scripts and tools to enable the delivery of bank platforms, applications and services, acting as a point of contact for solution design considerations
• Defining and developing architecture models and roadmaps of application and software components to meet business and technical requirements, driving common usability across products and domains
• Designing, producing, testing and implementing the working code, along with applying Agile methods to the development of software with the use of DevOps techniques

Skills

Python

Java

DevOps

Agile

Architectural design

AI/ML

AWS

Vector databases

Tools

AWS services

Vector databases

DevOps tools

Job description

Join us as a Principal Engineer

• This is a challenging role that will see you design and engineer software with the customer or user experience as the primary objective
• You’ll actively contribute to our architecture, design and engineering centre of excellence, collaborating to improve the bank’s overall software engineering capability
• You’ll gain valuable stakeholder exposure as you build and leverage relationships, as well as the opportunity to hone your technical talents
• We're offering this role at vice president level

What you'll do

As a Principal Engineer, you’ll be creating great customer outcomes via engineering and innovative solutions to existing and new challenges, and technology designs which are innovative, customer centric, high performance, secure and robust.

You’ll be working with software engineers in the production and prototyping of innovative ideas, engaging with domain and enterprise architects to validate and leverage these in wider contexts, by incorporating the relevant architectures. We’ll also look to you to design and develop software with a focus on the automation of build, test and deployment activities, while developing the discipline of software engineering across the business.

You’ll also be:

• Defining, creating and providing oversight and governance of engineering and design solutions with a focus on end-to-end automation, simplification, resilience, security, performance, scalability and reusability
• Working within a platform or feature team along with software engineers to design and engineer complex software, scripts and tools to enable the delivery of bank platforms, applications and services, acting as a point of contact for solution design considerations
• Defining and developing architecture models and roadmaps of application and software components to meet business and technical requirements, driving common usability across products and domains
• Designing, producing, testing and implementing the working code, along with applying Agile methods to the development of software with the use of DevOps techniques

The skills you'll need

You’ll come with significant experience in software engineering, software or database design and architecture, as well as experience of developing software within a DevOps and Agile framework.

Along with an expert understanding of the latest market trends, technologies and tools, you’ll bring significant and demonstrable experience of implementing programming best practice, especially around scalability, automation, virtualisation, optimisation, availability and performance.

You’ll also need:

• Strong Python skills or Java back-end engineering experience
• Generative and agentic AI using AWS services
• Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and vector databases
• Long-term and short-term agent memory configuration and tuning
• Context management and response-suppression techniques
• AI guardrail implementation and enforcement
• Tool-calling design and implementation
• Agent logging, monitoring and auditability