Principal Backend Developer

Waracle are looking for a Principal Developer to join our world-class digital technology consultancy and home to a diverse, smart, curious, and ambitious community of specialists in technology-driven transformation. We work with ambitious clients to help them solve their biggest business and customer challenges. We help our clients to innovate and create intelligent digital products and services. We thrive on complex challenges and deliver business-critical IT transformation projects, moving seamlessly from strategy, design, and delivery to operations.

This is a Hybrid role working from our London office 2 days a week.

As a Principal Developer, you will act as a strategic technical leader, guiding and shaping robust architectures, data strategies, and cloud-native environments across multiple squads and collaborative programmes. In this role, you will champion technical excellence, making thoughtful choices that balance cost, security, performance, and user experience to help Waracle scale and deliver high-performance, world-class products. If you are a collaborative leader who thrives on mentoring talent, fostering inclusive engineering communities, and navigating complex technical landscapes with empathy and pragmatism, we would love to welcome you to our team.

Reporting to the Head of Engineering, your role will cover:

• Solving Complex Technical Challenges: Partner closely with client technical and business stakeholders at all levels, gaining a deep understanding of their technology estates to advise on impactful, world class digital solutions.
• Technical Excellence & Delivery: Shape architectures across multiple squads; select tools and frameworks to scale across clients while optimizing for cost, security, performance, and scalability.
• Collaboration & Stakeholder Management: Act as a trusted advisor to clients on technical strategy and roadmaps, translating complex technical concepts into clear, accessible communication for senior stakeholders.
• Leadership & Community Cultivation: Mentor Lead and Senior Engineers, foster and grow our engineering community of practice, and ensure cross-team alignment on technical standards.
• Culture & Knowledge Sharing: Define and evolve Waracle's technical standards while contributing to our shared body of knowledge through lessons learned, thought leadership, and good practices.

Research shows that women and underrepresented groups often apply to jobs only if they meet 100% of the qualifications. At Waracle, we hire for potential, passion, and a collaborative mindset just as much as current experience. If you share our values and believe you can excel in this role, we strongly encourage you to apply-even if you don't tick every single box.

• Architectural Leadership: Proven experience designing, documenting, and scaling complex back-end architectures, distributed systems, microservices, and database designs (SQL and other technologies) within cloud-native environments-particularly Azure (with a focus on API management, maintenance, and scaling).
• Technical Direction & Delivery Ownership: Strong leadership capability to set clear technical direction, maintain a dedicated ownership mindset, and foster high-standard outcomes across complex enterprise projects.
• Consultative Communication: Excellent communication and influencing skills, with a demonstrated ability to navigate complex client organisations, support diverse stakeholders, and pragmatically balance commercial constraints with high technical standards.
• Team Mentorship & Growth: A proven track record of mentoring, developing, and aligning senior engineers and technical leaders to foster a collaborative culture of continuous learning and psychological safety.
• Modern SDLC Innovation: A pragmatic, forward-thinking understanding of leveraging and applying AI acceleration tools within the Software Development Life Cycle to optimise engineering practices.

You can expect an initial call with your dedicated Talent Acquisition Partner, who will chat with you about Waracle, what you are looking for in a new position, the salary for the role, notice period, and benefits. After that, you'll be invited to a two-stage interview process where you will have an opportunity to find out more about the role and showcase your skills and experience. Your Talent Acquisition Partner will guide and support you through the whole process right up to your first day with us.