Principal Engineer

VP Engineering / Principal Engineer (Level 2 Head of Engineering)

Hybrid

London

We are seeking an exceptional VP Engineering / Principal Engineer to act as the senior technical authority across a large-scale lending and customer-facing technology portfolio. Reporting into a senior technology leader, this individual will drive engineering excellence, modern architecture, AI adoption and technology transformation across a complex estate comprising approximately 110 people spanning both the UK and India.

This is not a traditional engineering management role. We are looking for a highly credible engineering leader who can assess the health of the technology estate, define target-state architecture, improve engineering capability and accelerate delivery across multiple product and platform teams.

Key priorities include driving modern engineering practices including trunk-based development, CI/CD, automated deployment, blue-green releases, feature flags, TDD, BDD, pair programming and engineering ownership throughout the software lifecycle. The successful candidate will lead the adoption of AI across engineering, both through AI-assisted software development and the delivery of AI-enabled products into production.

The role oversees strategic technology initiatives including legacy platform exits, cloud-native transformation, Salesforce migrations, AWS-based platforms and the evolution towards a modern microservices architecture. This individual will be responsible for technology health assessments, code quality, engineering standards, architecture direction and engineering capability reviews across the wider organisation.

Technology Environment

React, Angular

Java Microservices

Python

Golang / AWS Lambda

Temporal AI Orchestration

AWS

RHEL Linux

Oracle, Aurora, MongoDB, AWS RDS

Salesforce

Databricks, Snowflake, PySpark

Hadoop, Teradata and Ab Initio (decommissioning)

Ideal Background

Director, VP Engineering, Principal Engineer or Distinguished Engineer level

Banking, Financial Services or Big Tech background

Strong coding and architecture credentials

Experience leading engineering transformation at scale

Proven AI, cloud and microservices expertise

Deep understanding of modern software delivery practices

Ability to influence senior stakeholders without direct authority

This is a high-impact opportunity for a hands-on engineering leader to shape technology strategy, elevate engineering capability and drive the future architecture of a large-scale digital and lending platform.