Principal Software Engineer

Principal Engineer – Scalable SaaS / Data Platforms

Location: UK remote (optional office presence - South West)

The Brief

We are supporting a fast-growing technology organisation in the search for a Principal Engineer to help scale a complex, globally deployed SaaS platform.

This is a senior individual contributor role with strong technical leadership expectations - ideal for someone who enjoys solving complex engineering challenges at scale while influencing architecture and engineering direction.

The Opportunity

You will take ownership of critical areas of a large-scale platform, helping to evolve architecture, improve performance, and support rapid international growth.

Working closely with engineering leadership and cross-functional teams, you will:

Lead design and architectural decisions across key product areas

Build and scale distributed systems handling high-volume data workloads

Support the evolution of a SaaS platform serving global enterprise customers

Influence engineering standards, tooling, and best practice across teams

Partner with product and technical stakeholders to shape roadmap direction

Drive improvements across scalability, resilience, and performance

A key focus will be scaling platform capability - supporting increased data volumes, users, and integrations while maintaining reliability and speed.

The Candidate

We are looking for an experienced engineer with deep technical expertise and a track record of operating at scale:

Strong background in software engineering and system design

Experience building and scaling distributed, data-intensive platforms

Proven ability to design robust, scalable SaaS architectures

Deep understanding of modern engineering principles and best practices

Experience working in cloud-native environments

Ability to navigate complexity and bring clarity to ambiguous technical challenges

Strong communication skills, with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders

Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to technical leadership

Technical Environment

Experience with modern architectures and tooling is expected, with exposure to technologies such as:

Cloud platforms and containerisation (e.g. Kubernetes)

Event-driven and microservices architectures

Large-scale data processing and search technologies

Modern backend development languages and frameworks

Why Apply?

Work on genuinely complex, high-impact engineering challenges

Join a fast-scaling, product-led technology business

Influence architecture and engineering direction at scale

Fully remote-first culture with flexibility

Strong compensation and long-term growth opportunity