Principal Software Engineer

Title: Principal Software Engineer

Location: Hybrid (3 days a week in Manchester)

Salary: From £75,000

Who we are:

interactive investor is an award-winning investment platform that puts its customers in control of their financial future.

We’ve been helping investors for nearly 30 years. We’ve seen market highs and lows and been resilient throughout. We’re now the UK’s number one flat-fee investment platform, with assets under administration approaching £75 billion and over 450,000 customers.

For a simple, flat monthly fee we provide a secure home for your pensions, ISAs and investments. We offer a wide choice of over 20,000 UK and international investment options, including shares, funds, trusts and ETFs.

We also bring impartial, expert content from our award-winning financial journalists, highly engaged community of investors, and daily newsletters and insights.

Purpose of the Role

The purpose of this role is to support the discovery, design, planning, architecture and development across one or more delivery teams acting as an expert in a defined technical domain.

The role provides technical direction to deliver changes which establish new patterns and architectural designs or significant change to an existing solution in order to meet business objectives.

The principal engineer reports into the Senior Manager and works within areas of technical domain of responsibility, while collaborating with different functions across the organisation on technical solutions. The principal engineer supports the Technical Engineering Manager, by taking the responsibility for change to delegated subsets of the overall technical domain.

The role ensures solutions are successfully transitioned through delivery and into live where they are supported by the broader team.

Responsibilities

• As part of the engineering team provide direct support for ensuring solutions for the team are architected in line with the strategic alignment of the technology area.
• Ensure the smooth transition of technical solutions and knowledge to the wider team at all levels of technical capability.
• Support the discovery, architecture and design of new and more complex solutions and patterns for the team
• Deliver changes which establish new patterns and architectural designs, or support significant change to an existing solutions
• Support architecture decisions and solution design processes to an aligned strategy outlined across all of technology disciplines where solutions integrate.
• Directly contribute towards enabling culture of technical development and innovation within the team, through fit for purpose solution design and R&D activities.
• Enable the development of the technical skills within the team through knowledge transfer of emerging technologies and modern ways of working, whilst ensuring that high standards remain at the forefront
• Ensure that architectural solutions are aligned to the controls outlined by the control standards applicable to the solutions developed within team
• Support the definition of change specific NFR considerations as part of any solution design or architectural decision
• Ensure there is a clear alignment to assigned solutions within the change/priority pipeline. Ensure that these priorities are managed and any risks relating to the defined work are raised appropriately.
• Support the full development cycle of solution designs to all disciplines, including testing
• Proactively seek to identify efficiencies around process, solutions and technology
• Provide direct support for the (Technical Engineering Manager) by taking ownership for and management of delegated subsets of the technical domain
• Ensure risk considerations are applied to any solution design/architectural decision, highlighting considerations and options as part of any documented solution
• Ensure full stack security considerations are included in all architectural decisions and subsequent solutions
• Perform the role of a 'code guardian', primarily ensuring that the quality of code delivered through the team is of the expected high standard, as well as supporting the development of individuals in the team to consistently meet these standards.

• Extensive experience and background working within a development environment for the technology area
• Proven experience working within a regulated environment
• Proven experience working in Financial services or stockbroking
• Previous experience delivering change to business critical, highly available customer facing platforms
• A broad technical background, with proven experience supporting diverse technical integrations
• Experience supporting the delivery of change across the full project lifecycle from initiation to live support
• Experience delivering successful change through different methodologies including agile and waterfall
• Experience delivering change onto traditional DC based change/release platforms, as well as cloud based 'DevOps' managed environments
• Experienced in working in a high-pressure, time critical operating environment
• Experience of supporting the critical applications of a customer facing digital business.
• Proven experience working autonomously and owning assigned project deliverables
• Experience of supporting business critical solutions and systems running on cross-platform technology stacks in a production environment
• Experience delivering change through Build, Dev and QA to Production, using automation

Technical Capability

• Expert Architecture and Design Skills
• Distributed Systems and architectural experience of microservices, event driven architectures and serverless.
• AWS Cloud including step functions, lambda and general AWS architecture
• Expertise in DevOps and containers environments including Kubernetes .
• Expert software development, software architecture and technical delivery skills in one or both of either Typescript / React / React Native Eco System
• TypeScript and JavaScript Development including Domain Driven Design, Test Driven Development and tech training presentation skills.
• Client-side SPA frameworks, specifically in the React ecosystem for web and mobile-native (React DOM, React Native)
• Server-side SSG and SSR (Next.js, etc)
• Building accessible semantic HTML
• SEO and SEF
• Java / JVM Eco System
• Java Development including Domain Driven Design, Test Driven Development and tech training presentation skills.
• Kafka, Mongo, Elastic Search and Redis
• The whole Spring ecosystem included Spring Boot, Spring Cloud AWS, Spring Data, Spring Cloud Streams.

• Group Personal Pension Plan – 8% employer contribution and 4% employee contribution
• Life Assurance and Group Income Protection
• Private Medical Insurance – Provided by Bupa
• 25 Days Annual Leave, plus bank holidays
• Staff Discounts on our investment products
• Personal & Well-being Fund – Supporting your physical and mental wellness
• Retail Discounts – Savings at a wide range of high street and online retailers
• Voluntary Flexible Benefits – Tailor your benefits to suit your lifestyle

Please Note: We will do our utmost efforts to respond to all applicants. However, due to the high volume of applications we're currently receiving, if you haven't been contacted within 30 days of application, please consider unsuccessful.

interactive investor operates in accordance with the UK Equality Act 2010. We welcome applications from individuals of all ages, disabilities, gender identities, marital status, pregnancy/maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. We are committed to treating all applicants fairly and making reasonable adjustments where needed to support disabled applicants. We actively prevent all forms of discrimination, harassment, and victimisation—whether direct, indirect, associative, or perceptive