Principal Engineer – Frontend

Role Title

Principal Engineer – Frontend

Business Area

Enterprise Technology

Career Stream

Technical

Career Level

T5

Location

Reports to

Head of Engineering

Number of direct reports

0

Number of total reports

0

Department Context

Sitting within Enterprise Technology, 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 Connected Platform will sit across all Cox systems, providing our customers with a single point of access, to gain a single view of all of their assets.

Our Connected Platform team are committed to using cutting-edge technologies to support fast paced delivery and to drive innovation for Cox Automotive, and for our customers.  This is a Greenfield product, aimed at providing the technology foundation for the business for the next 10 years and beyond.

We are cloud native in our approach, seeking to leverage Managed Services where possible, enabling our developers to remain laser focused on delivering business value.  The product that we are developing will require the adoption of appropriate, and best practise technologies to ensure we maximise value for our employees.

Scope of Role

As a Principal Engineer within our Connected Platform team, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the future technological landscape of Cox Automotive Europe.  You will be a passionate Technologist, responsible for designing, developing, and optimizing our software systems and infrastructure, with a focus on React, micro-frontends, GraphQL, .NET, full-stack JavaScript, Event Sourcing, and AWS.

You will be a strong ‘hands-on’ technical leader, guiding the development team day to day, and working closely with our Architecture, Data, Infrastructure and Product teams, to ensure the 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-frontend and 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.

Tech Stack

We constantly challenge ourselves around our Tech Stack in order to keep up to date with the latest advances within Software Engineering.  As our Connected Platform is completely new, we are able to define our future Tech stack and this role will play a pivotal part in this.  The core Tech Stack is emerging as follows:

·       Could Platform: AWS

·       IAC: Terraform

·       Primary Compute: .NET 7 / Linux / Docker / AWS EKS / AWS ECS

·       Worker Compute: AWS Lambda (Javascript | Python)

·       Primary SQL: AWS Aurora ( MySQL | Postgres )

·       NoSQL: AWS DocumentDB | AWS DynamoDB

·       Message Bus: Kafka / AWS MSK, SNS/SQS, AWS EventBridge

·       Web Experience: React with Micro-frontends

·       Source Control: GitHub Enterprise

·       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 React, GraphQL, .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.