Principal Engineer - Backend (Java)

Principal Engineer (Bristol)

AND Introduction

At AND, we accelerate the development of digital capabilities. In practice, that means helping ambitious leaders and organisations build the teams, products, processes and even operational structures they need to close the digital skills gap within their organisation today, so that they thrive tomorrow.

Clients rely on our experience, agility and craft skills across tech and business strategy, software development and product management to address some of the toughest challenges facing their businesses.

We bring aboard thinkers, tinkerers, passionate software craftspeople and inspiring technologists to help us solve these challenges. Together, we’re united by a sense of pragmatism, purpose and a deeply-held belief that digital products and technology alone won’t transform a business or save the world: it’s the people that count.

About You

As a Principal Engineer for a club of over 80 people (approx. 30-40 developers of all experience levels from Associate to Technical Lead), you will spend the majority of your time helping build our technical capabilities, growing our technologists and influencing technical direction, both within AND and for our clients. As a result, you will need to be able to:

• Be initially 100% billable and hands on while the Club grows; as we mature this might be less and be a more pure consulting and BD role to help grow clients and fix failing projects.
• Help with winning new clients by helping to solve their technology problems; coming up with compelling and pragmatic solutions
• Lead the engineering and development thinking for your club, ensuring that this aligns with the Club Executive’s strategy, overarching business strategy, and client needs.
• Guide and support the improvement of technical skills for the junior to senior developers in your Club, during their time in internal projects between client assignments.
• Define coding standards and ensure they are followed during client assignments
• Provide technical oversight for client work on the Club’s most challenging engineering activities, working alongside the Club’s Product Developers and Technical Leads
• Enable an inclusive and diverse technology culture in your Club, and support these values on our client engagements, including building this culture onsite directly with clients and their incumbent technologists.
• Support club in setting up engagements for success, ensuring that technical direction and choices are appropriate for clients’ needs, (providing technical oversight during discovery) and supporting the project resourcing during discovery phase

• Collaborating with the Technologists of the Consulting team to establish AND’s tech proposition and develop Thought Leadership.

To do that, it’s essential you bring the following:

• Hands on coding capability to a specialist/expert level in Java
• Wide experience of pragmatic, hands-on technical delivery of enterprise-scale projects across the full SDLC.
• Deep understanding and extensive track record of delivering complex technical solutions using Agile methods including Scrum, SAFe etc.
• Hands-on experience of modern software delivery, including XP, TDD, CI/CD and DevOps practices.
• A keen understanding of industry best-practice around standards, quality and continuous improvement.
• Proven leadership of teams and teams of teams; extensive client-facing experience is expected.

It’s helpful if you also have:

• Experience in coaching and providing career progression to senior developers and tech leads, supporting highly experienced developers create exciting and inspiring career ambitions.
• Awareness to think about technology strategically, creating flexible and robust plans for investment and change, and communicating these effectively.
• Experience working with managers to deliver complex and sensitive technical messages/solutions upwards and across teams
• Experience of managing technologists across multiple teams to ensure they are working toward a holistic vision/goal
• Consultancy experience across a number of sectors is a bonus.
• As an added bonus, you may be a well established figure in your field; perhaps you are a recognised conference speaker or tech blogger/writer, are an industry expert in a specialist field, or have contributed to open source projects or charitable technical projects (like TuringLabs etc.).

Joining AND

From the work we deliver, to the way we serve and support our people, we work hard to ensure that there’s nowhere quite like AND. But joining a company is a two-way street: the fit has to work on both sides. So before you apply, here’s three key things to understand about us:

• We’re built for people - like, real humans. Not ‘resources’ or ‘staff’. That means happiness and wellbeing really do matter to us, and we hate unnecessary hierarchy and bureaucracy.
• There’s no well-trodden path ahead: AND is growing fast and forging a new trail. That’s exciting, and gives us all the autonomy and opportunity we love - but bear in mind it also demands focus, patience and resilience.
• Diversity is a priority. After all, to build great products that a wide variety of different people love to use, we need a wide variety of people to help us build them. So diversity is more than a policy or a word: it’s business critical for us.

Still sound good? Great! Fill out the short application form below and we’ll be in touch.