Principal Full Stack Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer

Salary to £80k, poss. higher for their ‘Unicorn’ candidate

Role can be based remotely, as long as you can occasionally travel to London for client work (travel expenses paid) - approx. once a month.

NB: Please only apply if you are a UK National & UK passport holder, have resided in the UK for the past 5 years and are prepared to go through UK SC Security Clearance. Proof of ID will be required prior to interview.

This role is with a growing is a technology consultancy. This is a hands-on principal engineering role: architecture ownership across multiple services, technical leadership across teams, and direct contribution to engineering standards and hiring. Their successful candidate will be writing code as well as setting direction - this is not a purely architectural or management position. Current delivery is a Java/Spring Boot microservices platform on AWS EKS, with a Next.js frontend and Camunda-based process orchestration.

Essential

Experience level: 10+ years minimum, principal or staff grade equivalent.

Backend and cloud:

Java 17 or 21, at expert level - modern language features

Spring Boot in depth: security, transaction management, async/reactive

Microservices architecture design - has designed services from scratch

Kubernetes and Docker in production (not local development use)

AWS, hands-on: EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, EventBridge

CI/CD pipeline ownership

Automated testing discipline: JUnit, Mockito, integration testing, TDD or BDD

Frontend:

Held a lead or tech lead role on frontend development in React. Leadership must have been over React work itself.

Understands and has implemented FFE/BFE separation - the split between the presentation layer (components, styling, client state) and the frontend's own server-side tier (data aggregation for the UI, session and auth handling, server-side rendering, API route composition).

Leadership:

Architecture ownership across multiple systems

Cross-team technical leadership

Track record of influencing engineering standards, technology choices, or hiring

Evidence o...