Principal Software Engineer – Automation & Agentic AI

End Date

Thursday 02 April 2026

Salary Range

£0 - £0

We support flexible working – click here for more information on flexible working options

Flexible Working Options

Hybrid Working, Job Share

Job Description Summary

We’re looking for an experienced Principal Software Engineer to provide senior technical and people leadership within our Automation and Agentic AI team. This is a senior manager-equivalent role, accountable for leading teams, shaping technology direction, and delivering high impact outcomes at scale.
As a Principal Engineer, you’ll take end to end ownership for your teams — their people, culture, ways of working, and the technology they build and run. You’ll partner closely with Product Owners to ensure clear vision, strong delivery, and continuous improvement.

Job Description

JOB TITLE:  Principal Technical Application Specialist (Agentic AI & Automation)

SALARY: £92,700 - £120,000

LOCATION: Manchester

HOURS:  Full-Time

WORKING PATTERN: Hybrid, 40% (or two days) in Manchester office

What makes this opportunity outstanding

Lloyds Banking Group leads the financial industry by integrating automation and AI into its operations. The Principal Software Engineer (Agentic AI & Automation) role offers the chance to drive world-class innovation and transformation. This position plays a key role in crafting the future of automation strategies and AI adoption, ensuring the organization maintains a competitive edge.

What you’ll be doing

• Leading and developing high‑performing engineering teams, setting clear objectives, encouraging a culture of innovation and continuous improvement
• Owning delivery across the full application lifecycle — from ideation through build and into live operations
• Setting strategy and technical direction to realise the value of running automation at scale for both customers and colleagues
• Providing technical leadership across agentic AI, automation, cloud platforms and modern engineering practices
• Driving strong Agile ways of working, predictable delivery, and continuous improvement
• Creating a psychologically safe, inclusive and high‑trust culture
• Ensuring solutions are secure, resilient, observable and supportable in production
• Providing strong line management and coaching to help engineers reach their full potential while building skills, capability and leadership depth aligned to organisational priorities.

What we're looking for

• Proven people management experience in a senior engineering role (leading teams of 6+)
• Experience in delivering automation at scale ideally using tools such as RPA, Intelligent Automation and Agents
• Experience in Agentic AI systems with knowledge of Agentic frameworks such as Langchain, Langgraph, MCP and A2A
• Hands-on cloud engineering expertise, with experience building secure, resilient and scalable platforms in production (GCP preferred)
• Strong all‑round engineering expertise spanning DevOps and CI/CD, containerised solutions (Kubernetes), Quality Engineering, Agile delivery, and architecture/design
• Confidence influencing at peer and senior leadership level

Why this roleAbout working for us

We’re committed to building an inclusive organisation that reflects modern society. We encourage applications from all backgrounds and offer support through reasonable adjustments if needed.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%
• An annual performance-related bonus
• Share schemes including free shares
• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle
• 30 days’ holiday, plus bank holidays
• Wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies

At Lloyds Banking Group, we're driven by a clear purpose; to help Britain prosper. Across the Group, our colleagues are focused on making a difference to customers, businesses and communities. With us you'll have a key role to play in shaping the financial services of the future, whilst the scale and reach of our Group means you'll have many opportunities to learn, grow and develop.

We keep your data safe. So, we'll only ever ask you to provide confidential or sensitive information once you have formally been invited along to an interview or accepted a verbal offer to join us which is when we run our background checks.  We'll always explain what we need and why, with any request coming from a trusted Lloyds Banking Group person. 

We're focused on creating a values-led culture and are committed to building a workforce which reflects the diversity of the customers and communities we serve. Together we’re building a truly inclusive workplace where all of our colleagues have the opportunity to make a real difference.