Principal Frontend Engineer

Devoteam; Porto; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work arrangement in Portugal

Impactful fintech project

Collaboration with client leadership

Job summary

Devoteam in Portugal is seeking a Principal Engineer to bridge strategy and hands-on full-stack delivery in a Fintech project. You will lead cross-team technical direction, establish reference implementations, and drive architecture decisions with governance over AI-enabled outputs.

You will mentor engineers, champion clean architecture, DDD, and secure coding, and collaborate with Architecture, Product, Security, and Platform teams in a hybrid Portugal-based setup.

Qualifications

• Extensive software engineering depth with recent hands-on delivery.
• Frontend/mobile and backend expertise in modern stacks.
• Experience influencing multiple teams without direct management.

Responsibilities

• Lead full-stack technical delivery and reference architectures.
• Drive AI-SDLC governance and safety guardrails for outputs.
• Mentor engineers and foster engineering excellence across teams.

Skills

Frontend/mobile

Backend expertise

Technical leadership

Azure

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Tools

REST/OpenAPI

Kafka

Observability tools

Job description

At Devoteam, we believe that technology with strong human values can actively drive change for the better. Discover how Tech for People unlocks the future, creating a positive impact on the people and the world around us. We are a global leading player in Digital Transformation for leading organizations across EMEA, with a revenue of €652M. We believe in transforming technology to create value for our clients, partners and employees in a world where technology is developed for people. We are proud of the culture we have built together. We are proud of our people at the service of technology. We are proud of our diverse environment. Because we are #TechforPeople. Join our multidisciplinary team of Cloud experts, Designers, Business consultants, Security experts, Engineers, Developers and other extraordinary talents, spread across more than 18 EMEA countries. Become one of our +8.000 tech and business leaders on cloud, data and cyber security. Let’s fuse creativity with technology together and build innovative solutions that actively change things for the better.

Job Description

As a Principal Engineer representing Devoteam at our Fintech client, you will serve as a cross-team technical leader and individual contributor, bridging the gap between strategic architecture and hands‑on full‑stack engineering. You will operate alongside client Tech Leads to enable product teams to deliver software more predictably, efficiently, and safely.

We are looking for someone who doesn’t just write code, but drives engineering excellence and scales AI‑assisted practices. As part of Devoteam’s delivery, you will create reference implementations, solve complex cross‑stack blockers, and establish practical standards, templates, and automation that product teams can seamlessly adopt. Working closely with Architecture, Product, Quality Engineering, Security, and Platform teams, you will act as a force multiplier across the organization while maintaining strong human validation and governance over AI‑generated outputs.

Key Responsibilities

Full‑Stack Technical Leadership

• Mobile & Frontend Roadmap: Define and drive the React Native technology roadmap, leading continuous improvement of the mobile app’s performance, stability, security, and release process.
• Cross‑Stack Expertise: Provide expert guidance across frontend, mobile, backend, APIs, integrations, data persistence, cloud, CI/CD, observability, and production operations.
• Technical Discovery & Reference Architectures: Lead technical discovery and engineering spikes for complex or high‑risk initiatives, building reference implementations that demonstrate approved patterns.
• Design Authority & Technical Governance: Review designs and critical implementation decisions for scalability, maintainability, security, resilience, and cost.
• Complex Problem Solving: Help teams diagnose and resolve complex production and cross‑system issues when normal escalation paths are insufficient.

Engineering Excellence & Enablement

• Quality Standards: Strengthen clean architecture, Domain‑Driven Design (DDD), secure coding, automated testing, trunk‑based development, CI/CD, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Developer Playbooks & Tooling: Create playbooks, templates, checklists, and automation to streamline engineering practices and establish clear Definition of Ready and Definition of Done criteria.
• Mentorship & Communities: Coach Tech Leads and engineers through pairing, design sessions, code reviews, workshops, and communities of practice.
• Sustainable Tech Debt: Promote pragmatic technical debt management, balancing rapid feature delivery with long‑term platform sustainability.

Architecture, Reliability & Security

• Cloud & Integration Patterns: Implement architecture principles in working software, championing API‑first, event‑driven, and decoupled integration patterns.
• Security & Observability: Embed security by design and advance application observability through structured logging, metrics, traces, alerting, and runbooks.
• Resilience & FinOps: Guide improvements in service resilience and recoverability while supporting FinOps practices to optimize cloud consumption costs.

Qualifications

Professional Experience:

• Full‑Stack & Engineering Depth: Extensive software engineering experience with recent hands‑on delivery of production systems, including strong frontend/mobile (React Native is a strong plus) and backend expertise (preferably .NET, Java, or Node.js).
• Technical Leadership: Proven track record as a Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, Senior Tech Lead, or equivalent senior individual contributor influencing multiple teams without direct management authority.
• Enterprise Complexity: Delivery experience in complex enterprise environments (preferably Fintech or regulated sectors) with strict security, auditability, resilience, and regulatory constraints.
• Ecosystem Integration & Cloud: Deep familiarity with Microsoft Azure, containerization (Kubernetes), REST/OpenAPI, Kafka, CI/CD pipelines, and observability tools.

Mandatory AI‑SDLC Experience (Concrete Examples Required):

• AI Tool Integration: Hands‑on experience using AI coding assistants or agentic tools in real delivery (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor).
• End‑to‑End SDLC Augmentation: Proven use of AI beyond code completion, including technical specifications, tests, refactoring, code reviews, documentation, or incident analysis.
• Governance & Guardrails: Experience defining validation controls, review practices, and safety guardrails for AI‑generated outputs.

Soft Skills & Mindset:

• Pragmatic & Hands‑On: Ability to demonstrate proposed technical solutions in working code while balancing engineering ambition with business pragmatism.
• Collaborative Influence: Influences through technical credibility, clear reasoning, and constructive communication across engineering, architecture, and product leadership.
• Mentorship & Leverage: Passion for enabling others and creating long‑term organizational leverage rather than becoming a single point of failure.

Preferred Experience:

• Background in financial services, payments, credit, digital banking, or regulated high‑volume transactional systems.
• Experience with platform engineering and internal developer platforms (IDP).

Additional Information

What Devoteam Offers:

• Strategic Impact: Drive the adoption of modern full‑stack patterns and AI‑native engineering practices at a major Fintech project.
• High‑Scale Cloud Environment: Hands‑on involvement in a modern, cloud‑native Azure architecture serving over 1M active customers.
• Elite Collaboration: Work in a high‑performance model alongside dedicated Devoteam specialists and client leadership in a hybrid arrangement based in Portugal.

Devoteam Group works for equal opportunities, promoting its employees based on merit and actively fights against all forms of discrimination. We are convinced that diversity contributes to the creativity, dynamism and excellence of our organization. All of our vacancies are open to people with disabilities.