Principal Developer

Job Title: Principal Developer
Location: London
Salary/Rate: £480-£530 a day
Start Date: Mid Feb
Job Type: Contract

As a Principal Developer within the Architecture Team, you will be responsible for defining and governing technical architecture across multiple initiatives You will design and validate architectural solutions, create proof-of-concepts (Pocks), and guide engineering teams toward scalable, secure, and resilient systems that meet both explicit and implicit business requirements.

Operating as a senior technical authority, you will influence architectural direction, ensure engineering excellence, and collaborate closely with architects, engineers, product leadership, and external partners.

Core Responsibilities

Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Help Define, document, and govern architecture, development, and data standards across engineering teams.
• Design and evaluate architectural solutions, identifying risks, trade-offs, and alternative approaches.
• Create Pocks and technical spikes to validate architecture decisions, technologies, and non-functional requirements.
• Provide architectural design input across products within the Bankers Almanac portfolio.
• Maintain accurate, up-to-date architecture artefacts and clearly communicate their implications to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Engineering Excellence

• Lead architectural reviews and provide actionable guidance to improve design quality and consistency.
• Challenge assumptions and continuously evolve architecture patterns and operating models.
• Act as a technical escalation point for complex engineering and architectural issues.
• Promote sound engineering practices and contribute to a culture of technical excellence.

Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement

• Collaborate with senior architects, engineering leads, product owners, and business stakeholders to align designs and resolve cross-domain concerns.
• Serve as the primary technical point of contact for external technology partners, vendors, and suppliers.
• Ensure architecture decisions support agreed SLAs, security, quality, cost, and delivery objectives.

Systems Reliability & Data Architecture

• Assess and improve system health, performance, scalability, and resilience, proposing preventative and corrective actions.
• Design and oversee complex data models, ensuring consistency, performance, governance, and regulatory compliance.
• Contribute to the evolution of data architecture standards, modelling practices, and knowledge representation.

Experience & Education

Required Experience

• Experience in software engineering and/or solution architecture within enterprise environments.
• Demonstrated experience operating at Senior or Principal level, providing architectural leadership across teams or systems.
• Proven ability to design and deliver distributed, cloud-native, and data-intensive systems.
• Strong background in data modelling and data architecture, across relational and non-relational technologies.
• Experience identifying architectural risks, evaluating trade-offs, and guiding technical decision-making.
• Experience working in high-availability or regulated environments (e.g., financial services) is highly desirable.

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Ongoing professional development and engagement with industry trends and emerging technologies.

Technical Skills & Expertise

Architecture & Engineering

• Expert understanding of software architecture principles, patterns, views, and modelling techniques (logical, physical, deployment, data).
• Strong experience with distributed systems design, including scalability, fault tolerance, resiliency, and eventual consistency.
• Deep knowledge of modern software development practices including Agile, CI/CD, TDD, and trunk-based development.
• Proven ability to lead architectural decision-making, assess trade-offs, and guide teams through complex technical challenges.

Programming & Frameworks

• Expert-level proficiency in Java and Spring Boot, with strong experience building RESTful and event-driven services.
• Strong working knowledge of Angular and Node.js for building modern web applications and APIs.
• Experience across multiple programming paradigms, including object-oriented, functional, and event-driven approaches.
• Strong command of Git and modern source control workflows.

Cloud, DevOps & Platform Engineering

• Strong hands-on experience with AWS, including core infrastructure and cloud-native services.
• PracticalexperiencewithDevOps practices, including:
  • CI/CD pipeline design and optimization Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Terraform, CloudFormation or equivalent)
  • Automated testing and deployment strategies
  • Environment management across development, test, and production
• Experience working with containerization and orchestration technologies (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes or managed equivalents).
• Exposure to observability and operational tooling, including logging, monitoring, tracing, and alerting.
• Understanding of security-by-design, including identity, access management, and secure deployment practices.

Data & Systems

• Expert-level knowledge of data modelling, design, and optimization, including schema evolution and performance tuning.
• Strong experience with a variety of data storage and access technologies, such as:
  • Relational databases
  • Distributed and cloud-native data stores
  • Key/value, graph, and indexing-based systems
• Understanding of data architecture concerns, including governance, standards, lineage, and data quality.
• Experience designing systems that support high availability, disaster recovery, and regulatory compliance.

Application & System Management

• Experience with application lifecycle management, including deployment, monitoring, and operational support.
• Ability to assess and improve system reliability, performance, and resilience in production environments.
• Familiarity with incident management and root-cause analysis, contributing to preventative engineering improvements. Professional Skills
• Strong communication and presentation skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly.
• Proven ability to influence technical direction across teams and stakeholders.
• Leadership mindset with a pragmatic, delivery-focused approach.