Principal Systems Engineer

In this role you will provide technical leadership for national, highly available distributed systems that NHS England operates. You will drive engineering maturity and align delivery with the organisation’s engineering principles while working with cross‑functional teams. You’ll tackle 24/7 availability challenges, scalable cloud practices, and security for large volumes of sensitive data, all with direct clinical impact. This is an opportunity to shape critical health infrastructure that supports hundreds of thousands of users daily. You’ll join a mission to deliver safe, reliable identification and services across health and care at national scale.

• Recruitment and Retention Premia (RRP) 25% per annum
• permanent contract
• flexible working
• 40% office-based requirement
• no visa sponsorship
• Band 8c

• provide hands-on engineering leadership for national distributed systems
• drive engineering maturity and contribute to wider improvement initiatives
• represent engineering at senior organisational level and influence decisions beyond a single team
• coordinate with stakeholders and delivery partners, identifying new partnership opportunities
• support product/service technical vision aligned to user needs and organizational mission
• participate in a shared on-call rota to support service continuity

• hands-on engineering across all stack layers (application, infrastructure, CI/CD, testing, monitoring, alerting)
• experience leading complex applications and influencing decisions at senior levels
• ability to coordinate stakeholders to resolve technical or organizational challenges
• Masters or equivalent in computer, scientific or mathematical field

• coaching and mentoring engineers
• leadership presence and ability to develop senior technical leaders
• strong stakeholder engagement and cross-functional collaboration
• end-to-end systems engineering across stack
• CI/CD, monitoring and alerting
• high-availability distributed systems