Principal Engineer - Business Automation
Sheffield, 3 days per week (MUST be OK with this)
Job Description
The Principal Engineer is the senior technical authority responsible for setting the engineering direction, ensuring platform reliability, and driving innovation across a critical enterprise technology domain. This role provides deep technical leadership, shapes long-term strategy, and ensures that engineering teams deliver secure, scalable, and resilient services that underpin the organisation’s digital ecosystem. The Principal Engineer acts as the highest-level hands-on expert, partnering with architects, product owners, and engineering squads to define standards, modernise platforms, and embed automation and DevOps practices across all services.
Responsibilities
1. Serve as the domain’s foremost technical expert, accountable for engineering excellence and long-term platform strategy.
2. Define and maintain technical standards, patterns, and best practices across the domain.
3. Lead complex design decisions, ensuring solutions are secure, scalable, and aligned with enterprise architecture.
4. Drive adoption of automation, DevOps tooling, and platform-as-a-product principles across all engineering teams.
5. Oversee the health, performance, and lifecycle of core platforms within the domain.
6. Ensure capacity planning, resilience, backup, recovery, and disaster-readiness are embedded into all services.
7. Champion observability, monitoring, and proactive incident prevention.
8. Identify opportunities to modernise legacy platforms, reduce technical debt, and introduce new technologies.
9. Evaluate emerging tools, frameworks, and architectures relevant to the domain.
10. Lead proof-of-concepts and guide engineering teams through adoption.
11. Partner with cross-domain Principal Engineers to ensure cohesive enterprise-wide engineering standards.
12. Work closely with product, security, architecture, and operations teams to deliver integrated solutions.
13. Mentor senior engineers and uplift engineering capability across the organisation.
14. Ensure compliance with security, regulatory, and operational standards.
15. Provide technical oversight for major changes, upgrades, and transformation initiatives.
16. Act as an escalation point for critical incidents and complex technical challenges.
Essential Skills
17. Hands-on experience with enterprise MFT platforms and secure file-transfer protocols.
18. Strong Control-M administration skills, including job design, troubleshooting, and optimisation.
19. experience building and supporting large-scale workload automation environments.
20. Proficiency in scripting languages (Python, Bash, PowerShell) for automation and integration.
21. Understanding of security, encryption, and compliance requirements for data movement.
22. Familiarity with distributed systems, databases, and application integration patterns.
Additional Skills & Qualifications
23. experience with cloud-based automation or MFT services.
24. Knowledge of API-driven automation and event-based orchestration.
25. Exposure to DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines.
26. experience with monitoring tools such as Splunk and Control-M Insights.
27. Understanding of ITIL processes and enterprise operational frameworks.
Location
Sheffield, UK
Rate/Salary
- GBP Daily
Trading as TEKsystems. Allegis Group Limited, Maxis 2, Western Road, Bracknell, RG12 1RT, United Kingdom. No. 2876353. Allegis Group Limited operates as an Employment Business and Employment Agency as set out in the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003. TEKsystems is a company within the Allegis Group network of companies (collectively referred to as "Allegis Group"). Aerotek, Aston Carter, EASi, Talentis Solutions, TEKsystems, Stamford Consultants and The Stamford Group are Allegis Group brands.