Principal Engineer

Role Title

Principal Engineer

Business Area

CAPTG

Career Stream

Technical

Career Level

T5

Location

Manchester (2 days) / Hybrid

Reports to

Director of Engineering

Number of direct reports

0

Number of total reports

0

Department Context

Sitting within the Cox Automotive Product and Technology Group (CAPTG), Product Engineering is responsible for developing high-quality software products for customers of Cox Automotive Europe. We adopt modern software development best practices, leveraging Cloud Technologies and DevOps principles to produce highly scalable, highly secure and highly resilient systems.

Our Arete Team consists of a group of Principal level technologists across various disciplines. We're outside the core Delivery Organisation.  We are not driven by ego or whimsy. We are servants. We are here to help. Whether that’s pulling legacy pieces into the cloud, introducing new patterns, connecting devs to existing products, helping to innovate with brand new functionality, or building something outside the box, we should always be thinking of ways to help the people around us.

We want to be pioneers as AI transforms the way that we work, so you

Scope of Role

As a Principal Engineer leading the Arete team, you will provide day to day leadership of a small team of Principal Engineers supporting all areas of the business.  You will be a strong ‘hands-on’ technical leader, and you will be equally comfortable pairing up with a developer as you are holding a technical conversation with a C-Suite colleague. 

You will work closely with our Architecture, Data, Infrastructure and Product teams to ensure successful delivery of our cutting-edge solutions.  You will have extensive, demonstrable experience of leading the development of modern software architectures, specifically developing and maturing micro-service systems, using modern best practise and leveraging event driven approaches to support highly decoupled systems, along with the foundation for real-time data streaming.

Whilst AWS is our ‘Cloud Platform of Choice’, much of our estate still lives in Azure, so you will be able to coach and lead development teams on a journey towards AWS, helping migrate and strangle existing systems as you go.

AI Adoption

AI-assisted development isn't a future ambition here, we're building it now. You'll help establish our Spec Driven Development practice and lead adoption of agentic coding tools like Claude Code, inspiring engineers across our teams to work in fundamentally new ways.

Tech Stack

We're in the middle of a deliberate, ambitious modernisation. Our estate has legacy roots in Azure, functional, but constrained, and we've made a clear strategic decision in that our future is a modern, cloud-native shared platform built on AWS.

We've redefined our tech stack from the ground up, and we're now executing a strangler fig migration at scale, building new capabilities in AWS and systematically retiring what came before. This isn't a lift-and-shift. It's a re-architecture, driven by engineers who care about doing it properly.

Our core Tech Stack is as follows:

·       Could Platform: AWS, Azure

·       IAC: Terraform

·       Primary Compute: .NET 8+ / Linux / Docker / AWS EKS / AWS ECS /.NET Framework

·       Worker Compute: AWS Lambda (Javascript / Python)

·       Primary SQL: AWS Aurora ( MySQL / Postgres )

·       NoSQL: AWS DocumentDB / AWS DynamoDB

·       Message Bus: AWS EventBridge / SNS/SQS

·       Web Experience: React, Angular

·       Source Control: Git

·       CICD: GitHub Actions

Objectives for Role

Technical Leadership

Provide technical leadership and mentorship to the engineering team, ensuring best practices, code quality, and efficient development processes.

Solution Architecture and Design

Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design and architect software systems that meet functional and non-functional requirements.

Development and Coding

Hands-on development across our entire Tech Stack, implementing robust and scalable solutions.

Cloud Infrastructure

Working closely with DevOps Engineering and our Infrastructure team to manage and optimize our AWS infrastructure, ensuring reliability, scalability, and cost-efficiency of our platforms.

System Performance

Monitor and optimize system performance, identifying and resolving bottlenecks and issues to ensure a seamless user experience.

Systems Integration

As a greenfield project, this product will need to integrate with existing platforms and data flows whilst maintaining data standards and data integrity.

QA and Test Automation

Tooling and implementation of those tools at inception and to maintain both the tooling and the effectiveness of the testing automation process throughout the project's lifetime.

Security and Compliance

Implement and enforce security best practices, ensuring compliance with industry standards and regulations.

Real-time Data Processing

Utilise real-time data streaming approaches to enable decoupled services, along with the data foundations to support innovation within our Data team.

Collaboration

Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including Architects, Product Managers, Designers, Data Engineers and QA Engineers, to deliver high-quality solutions on schedule.

Innovation

Stay up to date with emerging technologies and industry trends, and contribute innovative ideas to drive continuous improvement in our technology stack and processes.

Documentation

Maintain clear and comprehensive documentation for system architecture, code, and processes to facilitate knowledge sharing and future development.

People

Inspire and develop our stars of tomorrow, leading by example.

Skills, knowledge, and experience

Experience

·       Strong Software Engineering background with hands on experience of .Net, AWS, Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform), SQL & No-SQL databases and Event Driven systems.

·       Experience in a similar role, preferably in a fast-paced, Continuous Delivery environment.

·       Experience of domain modelling, event storming and other techniques requires to design and build scalable micro-service systems.

·       Experience of leading Engineering teams, leading by example to deliver high-end solutions.

·       Demonstrable experience in designing and delivering highly scalable, highly resilient, highly secure systems, using principles of data security & privacy by design.

·       Experience working with Product driven teams, adapting to changing demands of customers within a Lean / Agile environment.

·       Strong background in driving engineering culture within a Continuous Delivery environment.

Skills & Knowledge – Interpersonal and Non-Technical Skills

·       Excellent interpersonal skills, verbal and written communication skills when working with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

·       An influencer who can articulate arguments well and is comfortable working with a wide range of people from different areas of the business and at different levels of seniority.

·       A strong natural focus on what matters; delivering value and designing to minimise risk.

·       Hands-on experience of working through the end-to-end project lifecycle within an Agile environment.

·       The ability to work across multiple priorities in parallel and the ability to contribute to wider group strategies.