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