Principle Engineer

Principal Engineer 

Our client in Scotland is looking for a Principal Engineer (civils). The Principal Engineer is a senior technical authority responsible for defining the engineering vision, shaping long‑term architecture, and ensuring the reliability and scalability of complex, mission‑critical systems. Acting as a strategic leader and hands‑on expert, this role guides engineering teams, elevates technical standards, and drives innovation across the organisation.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve large‑scale, distributed, and highly available systems.
• Define and drive long‑term architectural strategy aligned with business objectives.
• Provide cross‑team technical leadership, mentoring engineers and promoting best‑practice engineering principles.
• Assess, adopt, and champion modern technologies, tools, and patterns to improve performance and developer productivity.
• Partner closely with product, security, and operations teams to deliver robust, secure, and compliant solutions.
• Lead technical reviews, ensuring code quality, architectural integrity, and operational excellence.
• Troubleshoot and guide resolution of complex, high‑impact production issues.
• Promote automation, observability, and continuous improvement across engineering workflows.
• Shape engineering culture by encouraging innovation, knowledge‑sharing, and technical excellence.

• Proven experience designing and delivering large‑scale, mission‑critical systems.
• Strong expertise in cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP) and modern infrastructure practices.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, networking, security, and performance optimisation.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction across multiple teams or domains.
• Strong programming skills in modern languages such as Python, Go, Java, C#, or TypeScript.
• Hands‑on experience with CI/CD, infrastructure‑as‑code, container orchestration, and observability tooling.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder‑influencing skills.
• Track record of mentoring engineers and raising overall team capability.

• Experience in platform engineering, cloud enablement, or developer experience tooling.
• Background building internal platforms, shared services, or reusable frameworks.
• Knowledge of enterprise‑grade compliance, governance, and security best practices.
• Contributions to open‑source projects or broader engineering communities.