Principal Software Engineer - Squad Lead Engineer

In this Technical Lead role, you act as the engineering leader for a cross-functional squad, balancing hands-on development with influence-driven leadership. You shape technical direction, drive quality strategies, and collaborate with Product, Architecture, QE, SRE/Platform teams to deliver secure, reliable, and scalable software for health education products. You’ll translate objectives into solid designs, maintain robust pipelines, and advance observability and security. This position offers impact across product quality and system resilience in a collaborative, values-driven environment.

• wellbeing initiatives
• shared parental leave
• study assistance
• sabbaticals

• Serve as the first line of technical escalation for the squad’s services/components
• Facilitate team ceremonies (refinement, technical grooming, sprint planning, design reviews) with a focus on flow and outcomes
• Translate product objectives into sound technical designs and testable acceptance criteria; decompose epics into implementable stories
• Design and implement complex features; complete complex bug fixes and performance improvements
• Define and uphold Definition of Ready/Done including code quality, automated test coverage, security checks, and observability
• Establish/maintain CI/CD pipelines, quality gates, and sensible branching/release strategies
• Drive a pragmatic quality strategy: test pyramid balance, contract tests, data management, environments, and non-functional testing
• Partner with TIO on SLOs, alerting, runbooks, incident response, and post-incident learning

• Demonstrated experience leading through influence across design, delivery, and operations
• Strong track record in at least one domain: distributed services, data platforms, or high-throughput web/mobile applications
• Advanced knowledge of Agile/Lean practices including backlog refinement, technical grooming, and risk-based planning
• Experience with test strategy, test automation, CI/CD quality gates, and release readiness
• Proficiency in Java/JVM, JavaScript/TypeScript, .NET/C#, Python, C/C++, SQL, Linux, or Windows
• Experience with relational and non-relational data stores, performance tuning, and data modelling
• Knowledge of CI/CD platforms, containers, cloud technologies, observability, and monitoring practices
• Understanding of secure coding, performance optimisation, reliability engineering, and incident response

• collaboration
• influence and leadership
• risk-based planning
• Java/JVM
• JavaScript/TypeScript
• Python