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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # Principal Software Engineer (Platforms) - **Company:** Rowden - **Location:** Bristol, UK - **Salary:** £67,031.0 - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** Audit Trail, Continuous Integration, Software Engineering, SC Clearance, Kubernetes, Software Version Control - **Published:** September 11, 2026 - **Apply:** https://www.adzuna.co.uk/jobs/details/5878706913 ## About the Role * Substantial experience as a principal or staff software engineer. * Demonstrable experience building developer platforms, internal tooling, and paved paths used by engineering team. * Hands-on experience implementing agentic AI in real engineering workflows (beyond individual experimentation). * Experience designing the guardrails around agentic AI: sandboxing, permissioning, audit logging, or observability for tools operating with elevated access. * Deep, hands-on experience of CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containers, and Kubernetes. * Experience of building and deploying reproducible development environments. * A track record of driving adoption by persuasion and good product decisions, not mandate. * Clear written communication, including documentation that engineers actually read., * You treat the platform as a product and your colleagues as customers, and you measure yourself on their throughput rather than your own. * You notice friction that everyone else has learned to live with, and you fix it. * You're a genuine advocate for agentic engineering. You make the case for it with evidence, help teams adopt it well, and are honest about where it isn't the right tool. * You are opinionated about tooling and you change your mind when the evidence changes. * You are comfortable owning something long-lived rather than moving between projects. * You can tell the difference between a genuinely better tool and a fashionable one. * You are honest about trade-offs, including the ones in your own work. No prior defence experience is required. We're interested in people who've built and run developer platforms in demanding environments, wherever that was. ## Description We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to build the Internal Developer Platform that our engineering teams depend on - a platform built from the ground up for agentic engineering. Our software teams work on hard problems under tight deadlines. Your job is to make sure the platform underneath them is not one of those problems. Working within the Platforms team, you will architect and own the tooling, infrastructure, workflows, and components that Rowden's developers build on. That means repeatable development environments, paved paths that are faster than the alternatives, and platform services that teams adopt because they want to, not because they have to. You will lead the implementation of agentic AI and passionately advocate for its use: rolling out coding agents, embedding them into CI/CD and day-to-day development, and building the harnesses and infrastructure that let them run securely, efficiently, and transparently. You will track new developer tooling and agentic AI closely, adopt what works before most teams have heard of it, and enjoy convincing others to do the same. This role gives you a whole engineering organisation to do that for. This is some of the highest-impact engineering in the company. It is not a delivery role. You will not be assigned to customer projects, and you will not review delivery PRs. Your users are Rowden engineers, and the platform is the product. Candidates must be eligible for SC clearance., * Build the Internal Developer Platform: design, build, and run the platform that Rowden's software teams and their coding agents depend on to write, test, ship, and operate code. * Own software engineering infrastructure and workflows end-to-end: source control, CI/CD, artefact management, secrets, and the environments our software runs in. * Champion new tooling and best practice: track what the best engineering organisations are doing, evaluate it rigorously, and bring in whatever earns its place. * Raise standards through influence: set technical direction and standards across teams you do not manage, by building things that people choose to use. * Lead the implementation of agentic AI: roll out coding agents across engineering workflows and own how and where they're used. * Advocate for agentic engineering across the business: run evaluations, evidence the benefits, and train teams on effective use. * Build the infrastructure that makes agents trustworthy: sandboxing, permissioning, audit logging, and observability so that what an agent did is efficient, secure, and fully transparent to the engineer who has to stand behind it. * Create repeatable development environments: make local, cloud, and target-representative environments reproducible, quick to stand up, and identical for every engineer. ## Related Videos - [Resilient by Design: Building Robust Architectures in High-Stakes Financial Systems](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/2106-resilient-by-design-building-robust-architectures-in-high-stakes-financial-systems) - [Understanding Kubernetes in a visual way](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100085-understanding-kubernetes-in-a-visual-way) - [Platform Engineering vs. DevOps Why not both?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/885-platform-engineering-vs-devops-why-not-both) - [No Keys for the Robot: GitOps as the Control Plane for Autonomous Agents](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100095-no-keys-for-the-robot-gitops-as-the-control-plane-for-autonomous-agents) - [Instant KAI Sandboxes with vCluster: Multi-Tenant, Multi-Scheduler GPU Sharing](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100333-instant-kai-sandboxes-with-vcluster-multi-tenant-multi-scheduler-gpu-sharing) - [AI Won't Fix Your Engineering Culture](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100266-ai-won-t-fix-your-engineering-culture) ## Related Articles - [Where To Find Software Engineering Jobs](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/396-where-to-find-software-engineering-jobs) - [What is Software Engineering in the Age of AI?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/640-what-is-software-engineering-in-the-age-of-ai) - [Is Software Engineering Hard?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/448-is-software-engineering-hard) - [Navigating the AI Shift](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/629-navigating-the-ai-shift) - [Fully Remote Software Engineer Jobs](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/447-fully-remote-software-engineer-jobs) - [Events like RSAC Get You CISOs. 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