Job Title: Principal Engineer Location: Sheffield, UK Job Type: Contract (3 days onsite-Hybrid) Key Responsibilities: Develop and maintain the long-term strategy for database infrastructure, ensuring alignment with the bank’s overall IT and business strategies. Function as a subject matter expert and advisor on all matters related to database technologies, providing guidance to senior leadership and IT teams. Collaborate with Product Owners, Architects, and stakeholders to define technical requirements and technical specifications. Co-Lead the design and architecture of the bank’s shared database solutions (DBaaS/PaaS), followed by their implementation. Stay informed about industry trends, emerging technologies and advancements in engineering practices, evaluating and recommending innovative solutions as appropriate. Support the Platform Lead and identify solutions to engineering gaps/challenges. Facilitate development of cross-functional capabilities to address common gaps/challenges. Act as key point of contact for engineering decisions from a technical and risk perspective. Look to innovate/improve processes, reducing hand-offs and automate processes. Technical Skills and Qualifications Required: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a relevant discipline. 10 years’ experience in engineering roles, with a minimum of 5 in a senior or principal engineering position. Technical proficiency in Database technologies, relational, NoSQL, distributed SQL, deployed on IaaS or part of DBaaS. Strong understanding of consumer use case and how databases infrastructure capabilities work. Expertise in infrastructure components, performance tuning, and capacity planning. Understanding of, and hands on experience of, micro services, software development, infrastructure automation, api development and basic application system’s design. Strong understanding experience on Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps Capabilities (CI/CD/CT Pipelines, Automated Testing, Code Scanning etc.) and Infrastructure as Code. Industry strength knowledges of testing practices and tooling. Proven track record of leading large, enterprise level projects and delivering quality solutions. Strong technical leadership skills, teambuilder and influencer Exposure and success working within a global matrix organization model. Familiarity with regulatory requirements and best practices in the financial industry. Ability to liaise with other engineers, architects, and business stakeholders to understand and drive the platform, product or service’s direction. Gravitas and ability to interact with and advise senior executives. Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate and convey complex technical information to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Experience of evaluating multiple technology solutions to define and design best fit for a particular use case.