Principal Engineer

As a Principal Engineer, you will steer engineering work across multiple teams to ensure sustainable, high-quality delivery in a large-scale, secure environment. You will provide technical leadership, coach engineers, and align technical decisions with government standards and strategy. You’ll partner with architects and senior stakeholders to plan delivery and maintainability, shaping how we scale and secure critical services. This is a mission-driven role at the heart of Home Office Digital, offering impact across 600+ applications and cross-functional collaboration.

• Civil Service Pension with employer contribution
• 25 days annual leave + 8 public holidays + 1 privilege day
• in-year reward scheme for exceptional achievements
• potential for office-based or hybrid working (minimum 60% in office)

• Lead engineering across multiple teams or areas to meet architectural and profession standards
• Plan workforce and recruit technical talent; coach and mentor engineers
• Ensure adherence to software design standards, governance, and secure-by-design principles
• Support technical decision making and contribute to roadmaps and strategy
• Coordinate with other engineering leads to form a collaborative community and central point of contact
• Engage with stakeholders to ensure product delivery and maintenance are on a solid footing
• Oversee alignment of approaches with Architectural patterns and integration with legacy systems
• Participate in planning alongside senior stakeholders to guide delivery and maintenance

• Experience leading engineering for large-scale, secure, data-intensive services
• Proficiency in NodeJS services (NodeJS, React, RESTful APIs, microservices)
• Define and assure software design standards and engineering governance
• End-to-end systems development across multiple teams with modern architectures
• Experience with automated testing, CI/CD (Jenkins, GitHub Actions), observability
• Technical risk management and alignment with governance frameworks
• Coaching and workforce planning to develop engineering capability

• leadership
• communication
• mentoring
• NodeJS
• React
• RESTful APIs