Principal Software Engineer

Job Description

Purpose of the role

As a Principal Engineer in the Software Engineering & Delivery team, you will focus on delivering automated tooling and software engineering solutions.

As well as leading by example as a hands-on software engineer, you will support the team by determining the optimal technical and engineering approach to building, onboarding, securing, monitoring, and generating data and insight from our tools and products and ensuring adherence to the approach. This role will help set the standards and engineering best practices across the central software engineering team.

This role is a critical position to help enhance and build our bespoke engineering metrics platform that will be used across IAG Software Engineering to drive operational efficiencies, surface metrics for data-driven decision-making, and encourage software engineering best practices.

The main product that this role is currently working on is a bespoke Engineering Metrics Platform that pulls data from multiple technical tools (e.g. GitHub, SonarCloud, and Snyk) to surface data-driven insights on an AWS and PowerBI-based platform. These insights help facilitate engineering productivity improvements, cost savings, and decreased risk of security or quality issues across all of IAG. The role will also work in close collaboration with the AI Engineering Platform squad within Software Engineering and the AI product teams to review their work and offer opinions on engineering quality and best practice improvements. The product is still in development and is continuously evolving in an agile manner to ensure it meets stakeholder requirements and surfaces trustworthy metrics that can drive business behaviours.

Qualifications

In your role, you will be responsible for :

Produce logical and physical designs for all layers of the tooling architecture, from user interface through to back-end databases and systems.

Write and maintain code to support the collection of data from tools such as GitHub, Snyk, SonarCloud, JIRA, Confluence, etc, and ensure compliance with the IAG identity and access management solution.

Develop tooling, API integrations to SaaS tools, and automation solutions to provide engineering and productivity metrics to collect insights from shared tooling, such as GitHub, JIRA, Confluence, SonarCloud, Snyk, etc.

Consider and evaluate potential package “off the shelf” solutions to achieve the defined requirements for AI teams (including piloting, prototyping and assessing cost of potential solutions).

Design and deliver solutions that achieve the requirements, using standard methods, tools and techniques. Obtain specialist advice identified on aspects of the design, technical policy, and test strategy from appropriate specialists as required.

Drive the creation of necessary documentation and Inner Source materials to promote best practices, share high-value engineering patterns, and create operational efficiencies in onboarding processes across Software Engineering.

Work with Engineering teams across IAG.ai and the OpCos to help identify valuable synergies and encourage cross-collaboration and adoption.

Drive CI / CD tooling enhancement initiatives to ensure security of pipelines, encourage modern software engineering practices, and introduce automated reporting capabilities.

Create environments that enable and encourage Continuous Improvement / Development and DevSecOps ways of working, taking input from process owners and other subject matter experts to gain a great understanding of business ways of working and challenges.

Plan, design and conduct tests of solutions, translating acceptance criteria into suitable tests; corrects errors and re-tests to achieve an error-free result. This includes actively seeking and deploying automated test solutions.

Work with Business Analysts and other stakeholders to understand their acceptance criteria.

Provide support on tooling, building, testing and implementing fault fixes and monitoring the solutions to prevent problems occurring.

Deliver on multiple projects, embracing and managing both business and IT change as necessary to help shape future direction.

This role may require travel and working from multiple sites / locations. You must be willing and able to travel to participate in meetings, workshops, and other related activities.

Skills Required

Excellent ability to deploy and maintain Software as a Service (SaaS) and tooling infrastructure.

Good ability to engineer / develop / code in the specific technology area, specifically :

Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions and infrastructure are essential. Azure experience is preferred.

Multiple databases and understanding of pros and cons of each for different scenarios

Broad programming and scripting experience in order to understand and drive best practices across different tech stacks, including but not limited to Typescript and Python

Deployment tools such as GitHub, Github Actions and GitHub Runners

Security and quality tools, such as Snyk, GitHub Advanced Security, and SonarCloud, and experience integrating into the IDE

PowerBI skills are highly desirable or a willingness to learn

GitHub Copilot experience preferred

Forming strong stakeholder relationships, with a proven ability of influencing and persuading internally and externally

Effective stakeholder management, balancing and finding compromises between opposing views and opinions

Business partnering, working as a valued partner with stakeholders across a diverse operation, delivering a value-added service to business customers

Ability to recognise priorities and guide others towards the accomplishment of strategic business goals and objectives

Ability to work under pressure and in a high change environment

Innovation - transforming industry trends into practical, cost effective solutions

Identifies and contributes to the continual improvement of software engineering capability across the organization

Excellent communication skills, leading with value and consequence rather than technical jargon

Experience

Proven expertise in the technical design, build, test and support of large and / or complex cloud solutions.

Demonstrable experience of deploying and maintaining Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions with an emphasis on automation and “Everything as Code”.

Experience in translating complex business requirements into system design, taking into account technical environment(s), ability of user group to interact with the system and expected life and volatility of system.

Demonstrable expertise in a specific technical specialism and / or broad technical expertise.

Experience of developing in an agile and / or DevSecOps environment is highly desirable, including unit testing, behaviour driven development, and continuous integration / continuous deployment.

Education

Educated to degree level in Computer Science / technical degree or equivalent industry experience.

Additional Information

Benefits

The chance to enjoy a challenging career in an exciting, fast-moving environment in a dynamic industry, working in a multi-cultural environment with great offices in many locations. We aim to provide all our people with a work / life balance, as well as the many benefits offered by a global organisation, including health insurance, pension, and performance bonuses