Principal Engineer

As Principal Engineer at Motorway, you will shape technical direction across multiple product areas and drive engineering excellence at scale. You will own the AWS partnership and steer architectural standards, reliability, and AI-enabled software engineering. You’ll mentor senior engineers, represent Motorway publicly, and define what good looks like for us in the AI era. This is a chance to influence how a fast-growing tech-led scale-up builds and operates its platform for hundreds of vehicle transactions daily.

• Great work-life balance
• Hybrid work schedule with 2 days in London office
• Stock options
• Pension scheme (NEST)
• Personal development budget for books, courses, conferences
• Health insurance (BUPA)

• Set technical strategy across product areas and justify it with data to leadership
• Identify cross-cutting architectural risks and resolve them to avoid scale blockers
• Establish engineering standards, architectural patterns, and reliable documentation norms
• Raise reliability, observability, and security standards across engineering, including SLOs and incident practices
• Lead AI for Software Engineering initiatives, monitor LLM usage and evaluate models for production use
• Develop and mentor staff engineers and technical leads
• Own the AWS relationship: architecture reviews, early access programs, and cost/service decisions
• Represent Motorway at external events and in the engineering community
• Shape how engineers present their work internally and externally
• Define adoption strategies for AI and AI agents, balancing domain depth with AI breadth

• Ten years+ in software engineering with several years at Staff or Principal level
• Exceptional AWS expertise: extensive production experience with serverless, containers, networking, identity and data services
• Ability to evaluate platforms against technical and commercial criteria and say no when appropriate
• Strong API and identity architecture background: OAuth 2.0, OIDC, PKCE, JWT, IAM patterns
• Proven experience setting observability and reliability standards and running incident practices
• Comfort across the stack and ability to read/write multiple languages
• Record of developing senior engineers into technical leaders and raising hiring standards
• Practical experience building with LLMs and agents in production with trustworthiness considerations
• Strong public speaking track record at conferences or large forums
• Ability to produce precise specs and architectures that translate into actionable work

• Strategic thinker with data-driven decision making
• Excellent communicator and public speaker
• Mentor and coach for engineering talent
• AWS (production scale, serverless, containers, networking, identity, data services)
• API and identity architectures (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, PKCE, JWT, IAM)
• Observability and incident management