Principal Backend Engineer

You’ll lead and inspire teams to focus on the customer impact and drive excellence at speed. You’ll ensure Engineering Managers are focused on the most impactful areas and that work follows best practices and standards, and are able to deliver the desired outcomes quickly with high quality.

Our Principal Engineers will be accountable for the direction of design and architecture. You’ll monitor technical performance across multiple squads and partner with Engineering Managers to mentor and grow the team.

You will raise the bar for our engineering team by creating and evolving chapter-wise best practices, and using your expertise, you’ll be able to anticipate the dependencies and needs of teams, customers and users and develop roadmaps that turn into projects and initiatives across your squads.

Our tech stack ️

We build and host our application and tools using modern and reliable technologies that our team knows and trusts, including React, GraphQL, Golang, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Docker and Kubernetes.

• You own your impact. You find a way to make things happen, and your word is your bond - when you say something will happen, it happens
• You lead with respect and candour. As an established leader in the community, you’re recognised for your deep knowledge in your core development specialism. You consistently help other engineers step up and grow whilst being able to find efficient solutions for other people’s problems
• You innovate, lead projects and drive change within a business. Through the systems you design and develop, you can deliver business value and high-quality work. You’re able to balance multiple goals across R&D whilst addressing concerns and turning problems and unclear goals into achievable projects
• You’re able to advise and impact engineering strategy. With your expert knowledge of at least two core development specialisms and your track record of advising various technical and non-technical stakeholders, you can steer an engineering strategy and work with leadership in urgent situations using your deep understanding of the products and services you’ve worked on
• You communicate intentionally. Your communication brings the best out of others. You can communicate strategy and present your findings company-wide and outside a company. You promote a culture of constructive feedback and praise and are an example that can provide feedback that enables others to develop

Your experience

• You’ve had a successful track record as a Principal or Staff Engineer in another company and can articulate and demonstrate your development over time: If you don’t meet this, you’re probably better off applying to one of our other engineering levels listed above.
• You’ve got deep understanding and experience in multiple engineering specialisations
• You can articulate how you hold yourself and others to high bars of technical excellence
• You can design and develop complex systems that scale
• You can give great examples of where you’ve been able to help engineering teams figure out the why, the what, the how and that you’re also able to do on problems of complexity and scale

The salary band for this L5 role is £120-135k. Titles and compensation at Pento are dependent on our internal levelling (L1-6) which we’ll assess throughout the interview process. We can’t guarantee titles and compensation until later in our process once we’ve assessed competencies, technical skills, and where you land on our frameworks., Our people-first, remote environment supports our team in adopting flexible and tailored ways of working. You can learn more about who we are and how we like to work over at Pento Home.

Our benefits include:

• An equity option plan for our permanent employees, so you can all benefit from our success
• Flexible working, and the best tech and home set-up equipment of your choice
• Unlimited time off and yearly team summits
• The opportunity to join an early-stage tech company on an incredible trajectory

You can read more about our broader perks here.

Don’t worry about your past experience being a 100% fit; we know that’s practically impossible anyway! If this sounds like an interesting opportunity to you, and you resonate with the role and the impact it will drive, let’s talk.