Principal Engineer - Network Service Automation & Orchestration

Software Director

To drive technical excellence and innovation by leading the design and implementation of robust software solutions, providing mentorship to engineering teams, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and contributing to strategic planning to ensure the delivery of high-quality solutions aligned with business objectives.

Accountabilities:

• Provision of guidance and expertise to engineering teams to ensure alignment with best practices and foster a culture of technical excellence.
• Contribution to strategic planning by aligning technical decisions with business goals, anticipating future technology trends, and providing insights to optimize product roadmaps.
• Design and implementation of complex, scalable, and maintainable software solutions, considering long-term viability and business objectives.
• Mentoring and coaching to junior and mid-level engineers to foster professional growth and knowledge sharing, elevating the overall skillset and capabilities of the organization.
• Collaboration with business partners, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions and ensure a cohesive approach to product development.
• Innovation within the organization by identifying and incorporating new technologies, methodologies, and industry practices into the engineering process.

Director Expectations:

• To manage a business function, providing significant input to function wide strategic initiatives. Contribute to and influence policy and procedures for the function and plan, manage and consult on multiple complex and critical strategic projects, which may be business wide.
• They manage the direction of a large team or sub-function, leading other people managers and embedding a performance culture aligned to the values of the business. Or for an individual contributor, they lead organization wide projects and act as deep technical expert and thought leader, identifying new ways of working and collaborating cross functionally. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organizational risks and strategic decisions.
• Provide expert advice to senior functional management and committees to influence decisions made outside of own function, offering significant input to function wide strategic initiatives.
• Manage, coordinate and enable resourcing, budgeting and policy creation for a significant sub-function.
• Escalates breaches of policies / procedure appropriately.
• Foster and guide compliance, ensure regulations are observed that relevant processes in place to facilitate adherence.
• Focus on the external environment, regulators, or advocacy groups to both monitor and influence on behalf of Barclays, when appropriate.
• Demonstrate extensive knowledge of how the function integrates with the business division / Group to achieve the overall business objectives.
• Maintain broad and comprehensive knowledge of industry theories and practices within own discipline alongside up-to-date relevant sector / functional knowledge, and insight into external market developments / initiatives.
• Use interpretative thinking and advanced analytical skills to solve problems and design solutions in often complex/ sensitive situations.
• Exercise management authority to make significant decisions and certain strategic decisions or recommendations within own area.
• Negotiate with and influence stakeholders at a senior level both internally and externally.
• Act as principal contact point for key clients and counterparts in other functions/ businesses divisions.
• Mandated as a spokesperson for the function and business division.

All Senior Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.

Essential Skills:

• Hands-on expertise in designing and building fault-tolerant scalable and secure enterprise-class distributed automation systems with business-facing APIs/Web UIs, spanning multiple domains including Network Provisioning, Security, Change Management, DNS/IPAM, Performance Management and Observability/Monitoring, across public/private/hybrid cloud environments.
• Expertise in the discovery and documentation of business requirements and the release of business value covering the desired automation system behaviour, and high-level system design required for automation development, using Event Storming and User Story Mapping workshops. Skilled in producing detailed functional descriptions of end-to-end intra and inter-domain automated workflow specifications using standard documentation such as UML, and knowledge of describing desired system behaviour using test-driven development practices such as Behaviour Driven Design.
• Specification of standards governing the implementation of APIs to promote consistency, enhanced business and end-user experience, and simplified cross-domain integration using popular stateless architecture styles such as REST and standards such as Open API.

Desired Skills:

• Experience of developing scalable enterprise-class code in one or more popular programming languages such as C#, Java, or Python including an understanding of software development approaches to solve complex business problems such as Domain Driven Design, and experience of working with persistence technologies such as relational and/or document databases, and experience of microservice architecture.
• Experience working within a product-focused software team, ideally in a Technical Product Ownership role, with overall responsibility for stakeholder management and the full life-cycle of feature development and quality assurance which includes automated unit, functional, integration and regression test strategies, software development practices and flow through multiple environment stages.
• Experience of networking technologies and network capability development as applicable to the development of network connectivity services, in one or more domains such as Datacenter LAN, WAN, and associated technologies. An ability to speak bilingually with network engineering/architecture experts and software engineers is an advantage.