Principal Engineer (Front-End)

As Principal Engineer at Hastings Direct, you will lead engineering excellence within the Technology Engineering function, shaping standards and delivery across the CIO landscape. You’ll combine hands-on technical leadership with strategic influence to impact enterprise-wide outcomes and coach engineering talent. You’ll partner with stakeholders to improve delivery pipelines, accelerate high‑priority initiatives, and promote a high‑performance engineering culture. This role offers scope to influence technology decisions in a fast‑paced digital‑first insurance business.

• Salary + Car Allowance
• Competitive Bonus Scheme
• Flexible Working (hybrid)
• Private healthcare
• Pension contribution match
• Mental wellbeing support

• Develop engineers through line management, mentoring, sponsorship, and feedback
• Tackle highest‑priority business challenges and prevent recurrence via learning
• Provide strategic and technical input to improve project outcomes and steer company direction
• Shape and enhance the delivery pipeline to boost speed, reliability, and SDLC consistency
• Identify opportunities to reuse and enhance existing platforms to maximise engineering investment
• Lead the Centre of Excellence for the domain, driving tooling improvements and best practices
• Champion high standards and link technical decisions to business impact
• Foster a high‑performance engineering culture and act as a role model

• Strong transformational leadership skills with ability to influence and implement new processes
• Excellent mentoring and people development capabilities
• Extensive experience in application and/or web development within an Agile environment
• Proven track record with at least one Agile methodology (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe) and tools like Jira or Octane
• Expert knowledge of cloud platforms
• Advanced coding expertise in React or React Native app development frameworks
• Expert use of GitHub for source control
• Strong build, release, and deployment automation; design/integration of CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps or Jenkins)
• Deep experience with continuous integration platforms (Azure DevOps, Jenkins, or equivalent)
• Experience in customer-facing web/mobile e-commerce, distributed n‑tier architectures, and API-driven architectures

• Strategic influence
• Mentoring and coaching
• Stakeholder collaboration
• Cloud platforms
• React or React Native
• GitHub