Principal Engineer

Principal Engineer

Location: Manchester

Salary: £66,582 to £77,368 a year This role qualifies for a 12,5% per annum R&R (Band 8b)

Vacancy Type: Permanent (Full-time, Flexible working, Compressed hours)

This role qualifies for a 12.5% per annum recruitment and retention payment, in addition to the Band 8B base salary.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is seeking a Principal Engineer to provide senior leadership across the engineering, deployment, and production operation of digital applications and services.

This is a strategic role focused on ensuring services are technically robust and designed to meet real user needs. You will lead the engineering of modern, high-quality live services, applying best practice in product development and user-centred design from early discovery and prototyping through to secure, scalable, and maintainable production environments.

Working across the full product lifecycle, you will partner with NICE Business Service Owners, designers, and stakeholders to translate user needs, service outcomes, and policy intent into accessible, reliable, and well-engineered digital services. You will act as a senior technical authority, ensuring that user-centred design is realised through sound engineering decisions and that services meet recognised standards for accessibility, usability, and performance.

Main duties of the job

A key part of the role is ensuring innovation and emerging technologies are adopted in a responsible, user-focused way, delivering measurable improvements to live services.

Reporting to the Associate Director of Engineering, you will lead technical direction across one or more teams and provide oversight across multiple programmes.

You will balance hands on technical expertise with strategic leadership,governance and people management.

Leading engineering delivery across large or complex digital services, ensuring successful transition from prototype to production

Owning and assuring technical decision making, governance and delivery processes across the product lifecycle

Setting and maintaining engineering standards aligned to GDS ServiceStandard, accessibility, security and DevOps best practice

Partnering with product and design leads to translate user centred design into robust, scalable digital services