Principal Software Engineer

Franklin Bates
Bs11Ad, BS1 1AD, United Kingdom
Last month
Job Type
Permanent
Work Pattern
Full-time
Work Location
Remote
Seniority
Lead
Education
Degree
Posted
30 Apr 2026 (Last month)

Principal Engineer – Scalable SaaS / Data Platforms

Location: UK remote (optional office presence - South West)

The Brief

We are supporting a fast-growing technology organisation in the search for a Principal Engineer to help scale a complex, globally deployed SaaS platform.

This is a senior individual contributor role with strong technical leadership expectations - ideal for someone who enjoys solving complex engineering challenges at scale while influencing architecture and engineering direction.

The Opportunity

You will take ownership of critical areas of a large-scale platform, helping to evolve architecture, improve performance, and support rapid international growth.

Working closely with engineering leadership and cross-functional teams, you will:

  • Lead design and architectural decisions across key product areas
  • Build and scale distributed systems handling high-volume data workloads
  • Support the evolution of a SaaS platform serving global enterprise customers
  • Influence engineering standards, tooling, and best practice across teams
  • Partner with product and technical stakeholders to shape roadmap direction
  • Drive improvements across scalability, resilience, and performance

A key focus will be scaling platform capability - supporting increased data volumes, users, and integrations while maintaining reliability and speed.

The Candidate

We are looking for an experienced engineer with deep technical expertise and a track record of operating at scale:

  • Strong background in software engineering and system design
  • Experience building and scaling distributed, data-intensive platforms
  • Proven ability to design robust, scalable SaaS architectures
  • Deep understanding of modern engineering principles and best practices
  • Experience working in cloud-native environments
  • Ability to navigate complexity and bring clarity to ambiguous technical challenges
  • Strong communication skills, with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders
  • Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to technical leadership

Technical Environment

Experience with modern architectures and tooling is expected, with exposure to technologies such as:

  • Cloud platforms and containerisation (e.g. Kubernetes)
  • Event-driven and microservices architectures
  • Large-scale data processing and search technologies
  • Modern backend development languages and frameworks

Why Apply?

  • Work on genuinely complex, high-impact engineering challenges
  • Join a fast-scaling, product-led technology business
  • Influence architecture and engineering direction at scale
  • Fully remote-first culture with flexibility
  • Strong compensation and long-term growth opportunity

Related Jobs

View all jobs

Senior Staff Software Engineer

Matillion Manchester, United Kingdom
Hybrid

Lead Software Engineer

Rise Technical Recruitment Winchester, United Kingdom
£75,000 – £85,000 pa Permanent Clearance Required

Lead Software Engineer

Franklin Bates Se10Aa, SE1 0AA, United Kingdom
£90,000 – £110,000 pa Hybrid

Principal Engineer

Hyperloop Recruitment Liverpool, United Kingdom
Hybrid

Principal Full Stack Engineer & Architecture Lead

BCT Resourcing London, United Kingdom
£80,000 – £90,000 pa Hybrid

Principal Full Stack Engineer & Architecture Lead

Command Recruitment London, United Kingdom
£80,000 – £90,000 pa Hybrid

Industry Insights

Discover insightful articles, industry insights, expert tips, and curated resources.

Where to Advertise Data Engineering Jobs in the UK (2026 Guide)

Where to advertise data engineering jobs UK in 2026: the specialist boards and channels that reach Spark, dbt, Snowflake and platform engineering talent. Data engineers occupy a distinct discipline that sits between software engineering, data science and cloud infrastructure — and the strongest candidates identify firmly with the data engineering community rather than with adjacent roles. General job boards consistently conflate data engineering with data analysis, data science and BI development, producing high application volumes but low candidate quality for specialist pipeline and platform roles. This guide, published by DataEngineeringJobs.co.uk, covers where to advertise data engineering roles in the UK in 2026, how the main platforms compare, what employers should expect to pay, and what the data says about hiring across different role types.

Data Engineering Jobs UK 2026: What to Expect Over the Next 3 Years

Data Engineering Jobs UK 2026: roles, salaries and the trends shaping UK data engineering hiring over the next three years — Spark, dbt, lakehouse and AI. Data engineering has become one of the most strategically important disciplines in the entire technology sector — and one of the most reliably in-demand. Every organisation that wants to use data to make decisions, train AI models, personalise products, manage risk, or understand its customers depends on data engineers to build the infrastructure that makes any of that possible. Without well-designed, reliable data pipelines, the most sophisticated machine learning model is worthless and the most ambitious analytics strategy is undeliverable. That foundational importance has made data engineering hiring remarkably resilient through the technology market corrections of the past few years. Where headcount reductions fell heavily on some engineering disciplines, demand for data engineers held firm — because the work of building and maintaining data infrastructure cannot be deferred in the way that some product development can. The data keeps coming. The pipelines need to work. But the data engineering jobs market of 2026 is not simply a stable version of what it was three years ago. The discipline has undergone a series of architectural shifts — from batch to streaming, from on-premise data warehouses to cloud-native lakehouses, from hand-rolled pipelines to declarative transformation frameworks, and most recently toward AI-augmented data engineering workflows that are beginning to reshape what the role looks like in practice. The employers hiring data engineers today are asking for a meaningfully different skill set than those hiring three years ago. The candidates who will thrive over the next three years are those who understand where the discipline is heading — which architectural patterns are becoming standard, which technologies are defining the modern data stack, and how the definition of a data engineering career is evolving toward a richer intersection of infrastructure, analytics, and AI enablement. This article breaks down what the UK data engineering jobs market is likely to look like through to 2028 — covering the titles emerging right now, the technologies driving employer demand, the skills that will matter most, and how to position your career ahead of the curve.