Principal Engineer (Web)

UK Telecommuter
REMOTE
REMOTE, DB REMOTE, GBR

About the Role

We are looking for a Principal Engineer (Web) to lead the design, architecture, and development of scalable, high-performance web platforms. As a hands on technical leader, you will set the engineering vision, drive technical excellence, and mentor teams to deliver exceptional web experiences that serve thousands of users.

You will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of our web ecosystem - defining best practices, guiding architectural decisions, and ensuring our front end and back end systems are robust, performant, and secure.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect & Design: Define and evolve the web architecture to support scalability, reliability, and maintainability across products and services.
• Technical Leadership: Act as a trusted advisor to engineering teams, providing hands on guidance in design, implementation, and code reviews.
• Innovation: Identify and evaluate new technologies, frameworks, and tools that improve development efficiency and product quality.
• Collaboration: Partner closely with product, design, and platform teams to align technical solutions with business goals.
• Mentorship: Coach and develop senior engineers, fostering a culture of excellence, ownership, and continuous learning.
• Code Quality: Drive adoption of engineering best practices - testing, CI/CD, observability, and secure coding.
• Performance Optimization: Champion front end and back end performance improvements for speed, accessibility, and responsiveness.
• Strategic Influence: Contribute to long term technical strategy, roadmaps, and cross functional initiatives.

Required Qualifications

• Experience: 10+ years of professional software development experience, with at least 3 years in a senior/principal role.
• Technical Expertise:
• Expertise in quality engineering practices inclusive of unit, integration, functional, regression and performance testing
• Strong background in scalable web architecture, microservices, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Solid grasp of web performance optimization, caching, and distributed systems.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code.
• Leadership: Proven experience mentoring engineers, influencing large scale technical decisions, and driving cross team initiatives.
• Communication: Excellent ability to articulate complex ideas to both technical and non technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in high traffic or large scale web applications.
• Prior contributions to open source projects or technical publications.
• Familiarity with web security, compliance, and accessibility standards (OWASP, WCAG).
• Master's degree in Computer Science or related field (preferred, not required).