Principal Engineer

Principal Engineer

6-Month Contract (Likely Extension/Potential to Go Permanent)
London or Edinburgh | Hybrid (2+ Days per Month Onsite)

Our leading banking client is looking for an exceptional Principal Engineer to join the leadership team of their Strategic Account Opening (SAO) platform, one of the highest-scale digital onboarding platforms in UK banking.

As one of three Principal Engineers in the SAO Engineering Leadership Team, you'll play a pivotal role in shaping technical strategy, driving engineering excellence, and partnering with senior business stakeholders to deliver a highly reliable, high-volume customer onboarding journey.

About the Platform

The SAO platform supports both new-to-bank and existing customer product openings across retail banking, including:
Current accounts, savings, overdrafts, loans, and credit cards.

At scale:

• ~7,000 products opened per day
• ~2-2.5 million per year
• ~140-person engineering organisation (UK & India)

Tech Stack:

• React JS single-page application
• Java Spring Boot microservices
• IBM BPM - moving to Camunda
• PCF - moving to AWS

What You'll Be Responsible For

Domain Leadership

Aligned to a retail business domain, you'll be accountable for:

• Building trusted partnerships with senior business stakeholders
• Delivering high- and low-level solution design
• Engineering standards, quality, governance and best practice
• Providing coding and algorithmic guidance (with hands-on coding where required)

Platform Engineering Strategy

Working with fellow Principal Engineers you will:

• Define engineering goals, roadmaps, metrics and success measures
• Shape the target architecture and platform evolution
• Develop colleague skills programmes and future capability plans
• Lead improvements across engineering tooling and ways of working

Wider Engineering Influence

You'll also contribute to engineering strategy across the broader tech estate, including:

• Inner-source and component reuse
• AI adoption within engineering and solution design
• Maturing engineering roles and operating models

What We're Looking For

• Strong hands-on engineering background, ideally in Java and/or React
• Proven experience in leading large engineering teams
• Excellent stakeholder engagement, especially with senior business partners
• Strong experience in AI/LLMs/machine learning/agentic systems (highly desirable)
• Banking experience not required
• We strongly encourage applications from diverse candidates

Location & Working Model

• London or Edinburgh (candidate choice)
• Hybrid: minimum 2 days per month onsite (may increase in future)

If you're a highly capable engineering leader who wants to shape a truly mission-critical banking platform, this is a fantastic opportunity to make a real impact.

Guidant, Carbon60, Lorien & SRG - The Impellam Group Portfolio are acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy.