Principal Engineer (.NET / Azure)

Location: London or Manchester    |    Type: Full time

About the Role

We're looking for a Principal Engineer to take a hands-on lead role across our core platform, working deep in both application code and cloud architecture. This is a builder role first, not a step away from code into pure management. You'll be writing and reviewing code, owning architectural decisions, and driving how we deploy and run things in production.

You'll be the technical anchor for our platform's evolution: cloud-native architecture, event-driven systems, and API modernisation, with real ownership of how it's built and how it runs.

Tech Stack

• C# / .NET (Core / .NET 6+)
• Microsoft Azure: App Services, Azure Functions, Service Bus, Azure SQL, AKS
• Azure DevOps (CI/CD pipelines, policy as code, quality gates, security scanning)
• Infrastructure as Code (ARM / Bicep or equivalent)
• Microservices and event-driven architecture

What You'll Do

• Own architectural decisions across microservices and event-driven systems, and stay hands-on writing and reviewing production code
• Own CI/CD pipeline design and standards: automation, quality gates, security scanning
• Drive DevSecOps and SRE practice: SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident response, post-mortems
• Work directly with Product to shape delivery roadmap and technical trade-offs
• Mentor engineers through hands-on pairing and code review, not just process
• Ensure the platform meets relevant regulatory and security requirements for financial services

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years in software engineering, with deep hands-on C#/.NET experience
• Strong, current Azure platform experience: not just deployment, but architecture decisions (App Services, Service Bus, AKS, Functions)
• Experience owning CI/CD and DevSecOps practice end to end, not just using someone else's pipeline
• Comfortable operating at both code level and architecture level; this is not a pure management role
• Financial services or other regulated industry experience is a strong plus, not a hard requirement
• Experience with real-time or high-throughput systems (payments, trading, messaging) a plus