We’re 1st Central, a market-leading insurance company utilising smart data and technology at pace. Rapid growth has been based on giving our 1.4 million customers exactly what they want: great value insurance with an excellent service. And that’s the same for our colleagues too; we won Insurance Employer of the Year at the British Insurance Awards 2024 and our Glassdoor score is pretty mega too! We're looking for a Principal Engineer for this h a nds-on technical role making use of .Net and Azure where you’ll be providing technical architecture leadership for a set of Focus technical products and services. The role will involve taking responsibility for determining the Focus technical direction in collaboration with Architecture and ensuring alignment to the overall Focus architecture principles following SOLID principles for maintainability and scalability. You’ll collaborate with solution architecture to give clarity and technical direction to engineers who will build solutions against the agreed designs. Whilst not having any direct people management responsibilities, you'll provide support, coaching and mentoring to Focus engineers to ensure they deliver to the required quality and integrity. We value flexible working arrangements, so you can choose to work remotely or maybe you live within a commutable distance from one of our offices in Salford Quays, Manchester, Haywards Heath, West Sussex, or Guernsey, and want to work in the office occasionally. Core skills were looking for to succeed in the role: A creative problem solver who thrives on creating simplicity out of complexity. A passion for people and creating environments that enable others to flourish. Resilient and comfortable prioritising in demanding situations. Highly trustworthy and able to operate with integrity and discretion at all times. Energetic and proactive, will enjoy motivating others with your “can do, will do” attitude. Able to operate with minimal brief, and a fast-moving set of changing priorities. Ability to bring together multiple different views and perspectives to create agreed designs and solutions. Hands-on experience in DevOps and/or Engineering roles Beneficial - Azure certified Beneficial - Other cloud platform certification Good understanding of a service-based approach to technology, including component, service oriented and event driven architectures. What’s involved : You’ll be r esponsible for creating or guiding the technical architecture and low-level design of technical solutions, taking high level solution and enterprise architecture artefacts and translating them into workable designs and work packages You’ll d rive forward and own the proactive monitoring of the products and services within your Value Stream You’ll p articipate in Enterprise planning events to support the delivery and planning of change ensuring that the high-level solution aligns to the business outcome You’ll h old overall accountability for the technical product deliver y for your Value Stream in adherence with our internal governance obligations and in line with the ‘Definition of Done’ You’ll be r esponsible for ensuring that speedy resolution of escalated priority incidents, problems and changes for all Products and services within your value stream including addressing follow up actions and improvements You’ll be r esponsible for the quality of the overall Focus products, ensuring that solutions are implemented effectively from a re-use and performance optimisation perspective You’ll be r esponsible for coding standards and low-level design for the Focus products that all engineers follow You’ll be responsible for the d esign and build of observability and quality by design into all Focus pipelines, promoting self-testing pipelines that proactively identify processing issues or discrepancies You’ll c arry out unit testing of own code, peer testing of others code to ensure ap propriate quality, and will be responsible for c ompleteness and integrity of solutions delivered on the Focus platform You’ll s upport the release process across your value stream and Enterprise providing expert guidance to team members during this activity You’ll be r esponsible for leading the SRE function within the value stream and participating in the on-call rota to support, fix, resolve issues 365/24/7 and adhere to the requirement and responsibilities of the on-call policy. You’ll t ake ownership for the creation of effective and appropriate architecture and design documents ensuring transparency and technical understanding for all Focus products You’ll c oach and mentor Lead and Software Engineers You’ll c omply with the requirements, and act in accordance with, the Group Code of Conduct and Fitness and Propriety policies at all times You’ll ensure compliance with Company Policies, Values and guidelines and other relevant standards/ regulations at all times You’ll collaborate e ffectively with Architects, Product Owners, Lead Developers and Senior Management to ensure fit for purpose solutions and service Experience & knowledge Requires extensive experience of designing and building end to end software solutions Excellent understanding of design patterns used in high throughput and availability cloud-based solutions. Professional hands-on experience of Azure and other Cloud platforms. Experience of C# .Net including dependency injection entity framework and unit testing. Previously experience of migrating monolith on prem applications to microservices based azure platforms. Experience of designing applications on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure) with an understanding of containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes) and serverless technologies Working knowledge of UML, software modelling techniques, tools and languages in order to describe software and data in a standard format. Exceptional at building strong, effective relationships with people from different disciplines. Experience of carrying out technical design and build activities using agile working practices (such as Scrum or Kanban). Unit Testing – Experience in writing unit tests for pipelines Azure Cloud – Knowledge and confidence in effective communication on Azure Cloud Subscriptions, Resource Groups, Subnet, VNet, Private Endpoints testing, Firewall rues management on Azure platform components Working knowledge of full stack solutions from SPA (ideally in Angular) to SQL databases. Skills & Qualifications A creative problem solver who thrives on creating simplicity out of complexity. A passion for people and creating environments that enable others to flourish. Resilient and comfortable prioritising in demanding situations. Highly trustworthy and able to operate with integrity and discretion at all times. Energetic and proactive, someone who motivates others by their “can do, will do” attitude. Able to operate with minimal brief, and a fast-moving set of changing priorities. Ability to bring together multiple different views and perspectives to create agreed designs and solutions. Hands-on experience in DevOps and/or Engineering roles Beneficial - Azure certified Beneficial - Other cloud platform certification Good understanding of a service-based approach to technology, including component, service oriented and event driven architectures. Behaviours A customer- centric approach. Collaborate and partner with a variety of stakeholders Ability to apply a product mindset Self-motivated and enthusiastic An organised and proactive approach A bility to work on one’s own initiative and as part of a wider team Strives to drive business improvements to contribute to the success of the business What can we do for you? People first. Always. We’re passionate about our colleagues and know the best people deserve an extraordinary working environment. We owe it to them so that’s what we offer. Our workplaces are energetic, inspirational, supportive. To get a taste of the advantages you’ll enjoy, take a look at all our perks in full here. Intrigued? Our Talent team can tell you everything you need to know about what we want and what we’re offering, so feel free to get in touch.