Job Title: Principal Engineer (Platform)
Business Unit: Process Manufacturing
Location: UK, Remote
About CAI
CAI is a leading provider of digital work execution platforms designed to enhance operational efficiency and drive productivity in industrial environments. CAI’s platform leverages advanced technology to convert complex, paper-based procedures into streamlined, digital workflows. By enabling real-time data collection and integration, CAI facilitates greater visibility into work processes, allowing organizations to make informed decisions, optimize performance, and ensure compliance.
In addition to robust workflow management capabilities, CAI emphasizes data-driven insights to foster continuous improvement. CAI's solutions are tailored to address the unique challenges of industries such as manufacturing, energy, and pharmaceuticals, helping organizations achieve higher operational standards and reduce costs. With a commitment to innovation and user-centric design, CAI empowers businesses to transition from traditional practices to a modern, digital approach, driving growth and enhancing efficiency.
About the Role
We are seeking a Principal Backend Engineer (Platform) to lead the continued evolution, strategy, and technical excellence of our mature, multi-tenant, microservice-based platform written in C# and Angular frontend.
This platform has been developed and refined over the past six years and now serves as the foundation for multiple products used globally across the seafood and logistics industries. Your mission will be to strengthen and evolve this core platform — improving scalability, reliability, performance, and developer experience as our product suite and customer base continue to grow.
As a senior technical leader, you’ll guide architectural evolution, drive automation and observability initiatives, and mentor teams in building robust, cloud-native systems. You’ll ensure the platform remains a secure, efficient, and developer-friendly ecosystem that enables innovation across CAI Software.
Key Responsibilities
* Platform Evolution & Strategy:
Refine and evolve the existing platform architecture to meet future scalability, maintainability, and security needs across all business-critical applications.
* Technical Leadership:
Provide hands-on technical guidance to engineering teams — from architectural decisions and design reviews to performance tuning and troubleshooting.
* Infrastructure & Automation:
Enhance and standardize infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, and container orchestration to improve reliability and developer productivity.
* Cloud & Scalability:
Optimize systems for scalability, availability, and cost efficiency in the cloud (Azure, AWS, or GCP).
* Observability & Reliability:
Strengthen and expand monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks to support proactive issue detection and continuous reliability improvement.
* Security & Compliance:
Implement and maintain security best practices across the platform — including secrets management, access control, and compliance (e.g., SOC2, ISO 27001).
* Collaboration:
Partner with product, application, and data teams to align platform services with business goals and ensure consistent, efficient development practices.
* Mentorship:
Coach and develop senior engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, technical excellence, and continuous learning.
Required Qualifications
* Experience:
10+ years of professional software engineering experience (including significant work in C#/.NET), with at least 3 years in a senior or principal-level technical role.
* Technical Expertise:
* Proven track record in scaling and maintaining mature platform or infrastructure systems supporting multiple product teams.
* Deep understanding of cloud-native architectures (Azure, AWS, or GCP).
* Strong expertise in Kubernetes, Docker, and microservice orchestration.
* Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar).
* Experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD, etc.).
* Solid grasp of networking, observability, and distributed systems.
* Leadership:
Demonstrated success influencing architectural direction and leading cross-functional engineering initiatives.
* Communication:
Excellent communication and collaboration skills — able to connect long-term strategic thinking with hands-on execution.
Preferred Qualifications
* Experience evolving developer platforms or “platform-as-a-product” initiatives within a SaaS environment.
* Background in SRE, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering.
* Familiarity with service meshes, event-driven architectures, or data pipelines.
* Contributions to open-source projects or technical publications.
* Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.