Principal Engineer - (Software Engineering | Data Platforms)

HSBC; Kraków; On-site; PLN 366,000 - 549,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Car allowance

Private medical care

Life insurance

Multisport card

Home office set-up reimbursement (up £

Job summary

HSBC in Kraków seeks a hands-on Principal Engineer to modernise a complex compliance controls landscape and help teams deliver safer, faster, simpler solutions.

You will be the most senior engineer, coding around 80% of the time, and partner with leaders to modernise platforms used for controls and surveillance, moving towards scalable, cloud-ready, open-source-first engineering.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with large-scale data platforms and processing (e.g., Spark, lakehouse patterns, DataBricks or similar).
• Strong experience with containerisation, Kubernetes and modern platform engineering (observability, resiliency, secure-by-design).
• Proven ability to choose the right tool for the job, explain trade-offs clearly, and drive pragmatic outcomes.
• Confident operating in a highly regulated environment with strong controls, auditability and security requirements.

Responsibilities

• Lead through delivery: design the future-state architecture and ship production code.
• Simplify and consolidate: reduce application sprawl, modernise legacy estates, and rationalise services and workflows.
• Build cloud-scale data processing: engineer batch/stream processing and operational data stores to support compliance controls and surveillance use cases.
• Deliver the consumer side of the Data Fabric: create governed, reusable data products and access patterns (APIs/events).
• Build integrations that scale: develop robust APIs and secure file-based transmissions.
• Raise engineering standards: modernise SDLC, CI/CD, automated testing and DevSecOps practices within a controlled framework.
• Be an evangelist and coach: communicate a clear technical vision and upskill engineers across pods/teams.

Skills

Large-scale data platforms

Spark

Data processing

Open-source mindset

Tools

Kubernetes

CI/CD tooling

Observability

DevSecOps

Job description

Enjoy building software and staying close to the code? Passionate about open source, cloud-scale data, and raising engineering standards in a highly controlled environment? This role is for a hands‑on Principal Engineer who can modernise a complex compliance controls landscape and help teams deliver safer, faster, simpler solutions.

You’ll be the most senior engineer and evangelist in the stream, driving Engineering Excellence while spending the majority of your time coding (around 80%).

You’ll partner with the value stream tech lead and leadership team to modernise platforms used for controls and surveillance—moving from legacy and vendor/SaaS solutions towards scalable, cloud‑ready, open‑source‑first engineering.

The focus is simplification (e.g., consolidating multiple apps into fewer strategic services), cloud migration at scale (primarily GCP; some AWS), and building governed data capabilities that work for multiple consumers.

What you’ll do

• Lead through delivery: design the future‑state architecture and ship production code.
• Simplify and consolidate: reduce application sprawl, modernise legacy estates, and rationalise services and workflows.
• Build cloud‑scale data processing: engineer batch/stream processing and operational data stores to support compliance controls and surveillance use cases.
• Deliver the “consumer side” of the Data Fabric: create governed, reusable data products and access patterns (APIs/events), with strong metadata, lineage, data quality and access controls.
• Build integrations that scale: develop robust APIs and support secure file‑based transmissions where required.
• Raise engineering standards: modernise SDLC, CI/CD, automated testing (including regression), and DevSecOps practices within a controlled framework.
• Be an evangelist and coach: communicate a clear technical vision, influence senior stakeholders, and upskill engineers across pods/teams (including acting as a local engineering champion in Poland).

What you bring

• Hands‑on experience with large‑scale data platforms and processing (e.g., Spark, lakehouse patterns, DataBricks or similar), across batch and/or streaming/event‑driven architectures.
• Strong experience with containerisation, Kubernetes and modern platform engineering (observability, resiliency, secure‑by‑design).
• Proven ability to choose the right tool for the job, explain trade‑offs clearly, and drive pragmatic outcomes.
• Confidence operating in a highly regulated environment with strong controls, auditability and security requirements.
• Builder mindset: respected for what you deliver; clear communicator with engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

AI and open‑source mindset

• Uses Agentic / AI developer tooling (e.g., GitHub Copilot) responsibly to accelerate delivery and improve quality.
• Comfortable working in an open‑source‑first way; contributions/blogs/portfolio are a plus.
• Able to apply AI/ML pragmatically (e.g., enabling models and data readiness for surveillance/controls workloads).

Nice to have

• Knowledge of front‑to‑back traded markets and related surveillance/audit patterns.
• Experience migrating off vendor/SaaS and workflow tooling (e.g., Appian) to self‑built or open‑source alternatives.
• GCP certification and real‑world experience designing, building and running large‑scale workloads on GCP.

What we offer

The pay range for this role is 32,792.00 - 49,183.33 PLN.

Additional car allowance in the amount of 7,397.00 PLN (monthly, gross).

Variable pay is discretionary, but influenced by Group performance, business/function performance and individual performance.

We offer a comprehensive and competitive package of benefits covering healthcare, family friendly leaves, pension and life assurance, as well as many other benefits to support your wellbeing

• Additional bonuses for recognition awards
• Multisport card
• Private medical care
• Life insurance
• One‑time reimbursement of home office set‑up (up to 800 PLN).
• Employee assistance program
• Additional contributions to PPK scheme
• Corporate parties & events
• CSR initiatives
• Nursery and kindergarten discounts
• Financial support with trainings and education