Principal Engineer - CPTO, BPL

Principal Software Engineer, Platform, BPL

As an Engineering Lead in our Chief Product and Technology Office (CPTO) you'll shape the architecture for tomorrow and mentor talented engineers, crafting elegant solutions for complex problems that millions depend on.

In this role, you'll help design and build highly resilient, scalable distributed services that power critical business operations. You'll work with modern JVM languages (primarily Kotlin), cloud native technologies, and contemporary frontend frameworks.

What you'll be building:

• World Class Distributed Systems - Design and implement highly performant, fault tolerant distributed services that handle massive scale with grace. You'll architect systems that survive failures, scale elastically, and deliver lightning fast response times.
• Domain Driven Excellence - Apply domain modelling principles to create clean, maintainable codebases that accurately represent complex business logic. Your work will set the standard for engineering excellence.
• Production Grade Quality - Champion comprehensive testing strategies-from unit tests to performance testing to chaos engineering. You'll ensure every service is battle tested before it sees production traffic.
• Full Stack Impact - Build responsive web UIs that delight users while maintaining the performance and reliability standards expected of enterprise grade applications.
• Ownership - Live the "you build it, you run it" philosophy. You'll participate in on call rotations (shared across the team), gaining insight into how your systems perform in the wild and driving continuous improvement.
• Security First - Embed security into every layer of your solutions, ensuring customer data is protected with industry leading practices and zero trust principles.
• AI Augmented Development - Leverage AI powered tools to accelerate development while ensuring every line of code-whether human or AI generated-meets our exacting production standards.

Essential skills include:

• Experience gained in a Payment Acquiring, Fintech, or Payment SaaS business.
• Product thinking approach - treat the platform as a product, with fellow engineers as your customers.
• Sophisticated communication - demonstrate the ability to bring both technical and non technical stakeholders on the journey, e.g., explaining complex technical trade offs to those who might not know what a "service mesh" is.
• A polyglot mindset - expertise in at least two languages and a "right tool for the job" philosophy.
• JVM mastery - Deep expertise in at least one JVM language, primarily Kotlin, or strong Java, Scala, or Clojure experience.
• Cloud Native mindset - Hands on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and understanding of cloud design patterns.
• Messaging & events - Solid grasp of messaging technologies (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, NATS) and event driven architecture patterns.
• Data layer expertise - Experience with both SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis) databases, understanding when to use each.
• API design - Proven track record designing and implementing RESTful and/or GraphQL APIs that scale.
• Rust - Experience with systems programming and performance critical services.
• AWS mastery - Advanced AWS knowledge.
• Kubernetes - Container orchestration experience with K8s, Helm, and cloud native deployment strategies.
• React - Modern frontend development skills with React, TypeScript, and state management libraries.
• Observability - Experience with monitoring, logging, and tracing tools.
• CI/CD wizardry - Strong DevOps mindset with experience in automated deployment pipelines, infrastructure as code, and GitOps practices.

Location:

London (1 Churchill Place and 7 Westferry Circus - new BPL office) or Northampton.

We support a hybrid working pattern with 3 days per week office based presence expected.

Purpose of the role

To drive technical excellence and innovation by leading the design and implementation of robust software solutions, providing mentorship to engineering teams, fostering cross functional collaboration, and contributing to strategic planning to ensure the delivery of high quality solutions aligned with business objectives.

Accountabilities

• Provision of guidance and expertise to engineering teams to ensure alignment with best practices and foster a culture of technical excellence.
• Contribution to strategic planning by aligning technical decisions with business goals, anticipating future technology trends, and providing insights to optimize product roadmaps.
• Design and implementation of complex, scalable, and maintainable software solutions, considering long term viability and business objectives.
• Mentoring and coaching to junior and mid level engineers to foster professional growth and knowledge sharing, elevating the overall skillset and capabilities of the organization.
• Collaboration with business partners, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions and ensure a cohesive approach to product development.
• Innovation within the organization by identifying and incorporating new technologies, methodologies, and industry practices into the engineering process.