Principal Software Engineer

Franklin Bates Limited
Bristol, United Kingdom
yesterday

Role details

Contract type
Permanent contract
Employment type
Full-time (> 32 hours)
Working hours
Regular working hours
Languages
English
Experience level
Senior
Compensation
£ 81K

Job location

Remote
Bristol, United Kingdom

Tech stack

Architectural Patterns
Big Data
Software as a Service
Cloud Computing
Distributed Systems
Search Technologies
Software Engineering
Backend
Containerization
Kubernetes
Microservices

Job description

We are supporting a fast-growing technology organisation in the search for a Principal Engineer to help scale a complex, globally deployed SaaS platform.

This is a senior individual contributor role with strong technical leadership expectations - ideal for someone who enjoys solving complex engineering challenges at scale while influencing architecture and engineering direction.

The Opportunity

You will take ownership of critical areas of a large-scale platform, helping to evolve architecture, improve performance, and support rapid international growth.

Working closely with engineering leadership and cross-functional teams, you will:

  • Lead design and architectural decisions across key product areas
  • Build and scale distributed systems handling high-volume data workloads
  • Support the evolution of a SaaS platform serving global enterprise customers
  • Influence engineering standards, tooling, and best practice across teams
  • Partner with product and technical stakeholders to shape roadmap direction
  • Drive improvements across scalability, resilience, and performance

A key focus will be scaling platform capability - supporting increased data volumes, users, and integrations while maintaining reliability and speed.

Requirements

We are looking for an experienced engineer with deep technical expertise and a track record of operating at scale:

  • Strong background in software engineering and system design
  • Experience building and scaling distributed, data-intensive platforms
  • Proven ability to design robust, scalable SaaS architectures
  • Deep understanding of modern engineering principles and best practices
  • Experience working in cloud-native environments
  • Ability to navigate complexity and bring clarity to ambiguous technical challenges
  • Strong communication skills, with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders
  • Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to technical leadership

Technical Environment

Experience with modern architectures and tooling is expected, with exposure to technologies such as:

  • Cloud platforms and containerisation (e.g. Kubernetes)
  • Event-driven and microservices architectures
  • Large-scale data processing and search technologies
  • Modern backend development languages and frameworks

Apply for this position