Principal Software Engineer - £Excellent

We recognise our people are the best thing about Red Badger and that a truly diverse workplace where people are free to be themselves is essential for great culture and great outcomes. If you like solving difficult problems, working with great people and making a real impact, join us and become a Badger.

At Red Badger, our purpose is to make a positive impact on the world around us. Our mission is to transform blue-chips into next generation digital product organisations.

We believe in creating opportunities for all. We benefit from diversity. That said, we're far from perfect - we want to be more diverse and representative. Join us and help make that happen.

London

Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer

The role

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our digital product delivery function.

Red Badger delivers high quality digital products using a lean delivery process and multidisciplinary, cross-functional teams.

The Principal Software Engineer is a senior technical leader with deep expertise in building and operating digital products, particularly within complex client environments and multi-team projects. This role is instrumental in shaping the technical direction of client engagements and plays a key part in delivering high-quality outcomes through strategic influence, hands-on support, and deep domain knowledge.

You will collaborate closely with Principal Product and Delivery roles, as well as Technical and Delivery Leads, to ensure that technology choices align with both client goals and Red Badger's value propositions. You will engage with senior stakeholders to consult and influence on topics such as technology adoption, continuous delivery, team structure, deployment strategy, and organisational policy. Your ability to guide clients through emerging technologies and industry best practice will help create the conditions for teams to succeed with autonomy and impact.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you elevate those around you by supercharging delivery teams, mentoring others, and embedding technical excellence at every level. You bring thought leadership, pragmatism, and curiosity to solving complex problems, and are trusted to represent Red Badger in high-level client conversations with confidence and clarity.

There is also an internal quality aspect to the role which involves contributing to the elevation of technical standards across Red Badger, and how we represent ourselves externally to the industry.

Hands-on work is expected to be the majority of the role - demonstrating by doing, but also be prepared to get involved in thought leadership, sharing your knowledge with other badgers, and high value consulting activities.

The Principal Software Engineer works across a range of account sizes but will be equally comfortable coordinating technology across a multi-team programme as they are providing high value consulting services to define client technology strategy or running proof of concept work streams for senior technology stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

• Supporting lean approach to software delivery and overall solution design and focus on delivering maximum value with minimal effort
• Providing architectural framework and solution design
• Advocating innovative approach / use of new technology where appropriate
• Ensuring quality through coaching, pairing, reviewing code
• Advocating for simplicity in design approach, ways of working and tool choice
• Deep technical expertise and teaching mindset
• Upskilling Red Badger software engineers in new technologies and approaches
• Contributing to raising technology discipline standards within Red Badger
• Collaborative leadership
• Feed into account level technology leadership / governance
• Contributing to the overall success of the Red Badger client engagement
• Potentially leadingmultipletechnology teamsacrossa programme of work
• Aligning Badger / client teams on appropriate processes & tooling
• Consulting on areas of technology expertise
• Contributing to new business pitches and thought leadership
• Operating as trusted advisor consulting on client technology strategy, technology roadmap
• Coaching senior client technology stakeholders
• Industry focus
• Keeping abreast of industry trends and opportunities
• Thought leadership and continually evolving best practice
• Organising and speaking at events / meetups
• Supporting our team
• Line management of senior engineering team members
• Contributing to the technical discipline within Red Badger
• Helping to build a high performing and motivated Badger engineering team

Your experience

• It'd be great if you have
• Experience in a consulting environment with client engagements
• Ability to influence senior client stakeholders and support teams with technology and process enablers to support continuous delivery and DevOps ways of working
• Experience with multiple programming languages, in web and/or mobile and multiple paradigms (e.g. declarative, functional, object oriented )
• Experience with establishing good engineering practice focused on lean, cross-discipline, continuous delivery
• Experience with cloud infrastructure such as Azure, GCP, AWS, and understanding of progressive ways of managing infrastructure, such as infrastructure-as-code, cluster orchestration tools (e.g. Docker, K8s),
• Experience with setting up modern CI/CD pipelines to support continuous delivery and deployment and good understanding of the trade-offs (e.g. pipelines-as-code, monorepos, GitOps, branching and release strategies, etc.)
• Experience in designing system-level architecture and navigating trade-offs in web based systems (e.g. Microservices, REST APIs, CQRS)
• An understanding of information security including common attack vectors, awareness of relevant regulation and restrictions (e.g. PCI, GDPR )
• Experience in design and testing strategies to enable gradual evolution of systems over time
• Good understanding of data storage approaches and tools and trade-offs involved (RBDMSs, key-value stores, column stores, log storage, )
• Good understanding of applying cryptography in software development (e.g. TLS, PKI, HMAC, hashing algorithms, etc.)
• Good understanding of algorithms and data structures to solve distributed computing problems (e.g. content-based addressing, immutable data structures, CRDTs, consensus protocols, merkle DAGs, etc.
• It'd be amazing if you can also
• An understanding of information security including common attack vectors, awareness of relevant regulation and restrictions
• Experience with running live services with significant volume of users and establishing appropriate SLOs and error budgets for services and applications
• Experience designing observability strategies for systems with multiple components

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