Principle Engineer - BPL

Principal Software Engineer, Platform

Barclays' payments acceptance business provides critical infrastructure to the UK economy, processing billions of pounds of payments annually for both small businesses and domestic and international corporate clients.

In April 2025, we announced a long-term partnership with Brookfield Asset Management to grow and transform the payments acceptance business by broadening the range of services offered, enhancing the experience for both existing and prospective clients. Leveraging extensive client relationships and deep experience of UK payments, we will create an environment of continuous innovation - activated by Brookfield's global private equity expertise in payments, technology, operational transformation and corporate carve-outs - to ensure the business is strategically positioned for long-term growth.

Barclays will invest approximately £400m in the new business, the majority of which will be incurred during the first three years. Performance-linked incentives will drive greater alignment between the partners, underpinning the long-term commitment to the transformation. Barclays and Brookfield will work to create a standalone entity over time, continuing to use the Barclaycard Payments (BPL) brand and acting as the sole payments acceptance services provider to Barclays' clients for a minimum of ten years.

Our platform & infrastructure team provide the hardened, high-velocity foundations that allow our product teams to ship code to production that moves billions of pounds with total confidence.

As a Principal Software Engineer for our Platform team, you are both an architect of our engineering principles and a builder of the ground we stand on. This is a high-leverage position where you'll define how we scale, how we deploy, and how we maintain excellence. You'll spend your time at the intersection of deep technical strategy and hands-on execution, ensuring our internal systems are as polished as our customer-facing products.

With a ruthless focus on optimising developer experience, you'll lead on designing, operating, and refining our internal developer platform. Leading the migration toward (or optimisation of) distributed systems, ensuring high availability and low latency.

We need to support a rapidly growing set of product engineering teams in building, shipping, and operating software quickly and safely. It's imperative we get the 'height' of the platform correct: sufficient defaults for the majority of workloads, with escape hatches where teams have a strong reason for deviating.

As members of a highly regulated industry, we hold ourselves to the highest standards when it comes to compliance, controls, and policies. We believe we can meet these standards whilst still enabling engineers to ship multiple times a day: you'll lead on the creative design and implementation of these control and compliance points within our SDLC in a way which empowers teams, rather than as stop-gates.

We are building the tooling that allows us, and our product teams, to see around corners – providing monitoring, logging, and rapid incident response frameworks and playbooks to teams.

Mentorship: beyond just "code reviews," you'll be levelling up the entire engineering organization through RFCs, workshops, and fostering internal communities of practice.

To succeed in this role, you'll need:

• A storied history – you've spent significant time building complex, scalable systems. You've seen things break at scale, and you know how to prevent it
• Mastery of skills – a strong command of cloud, kubernetes, and the broader CNCF ecosystem
• A polyglot mindset – expertise of at least two languages (e.g., Rust, Go, Kotlin) and a "right tool for the job" philosophy
• Product thinking – you treat the platform as a product, with fellow engineers as your customers
• Craft of communication – the ability to bring both technical and non-technical stakeholders on the journey with us, explaining complex technical trade-offs to those who might not know what a "service mesh" is

Success in this role is measured not just by the code you commit, but by the cumulative velocity and confidence of the entire engineering organization. You will know you are succeeding when the "tax" of infrastructure is minimized, and our feature teams can focus entirely on delivering value to our customers.

Ultimately, your success is reflected in the growth of those around you. You will have mentored a new generation of senior and staff engineers, fostering a community of practice that values simplicity and automation. The platform you've built will be considered "invisible" in the best way possible: a seamless, reliable foundation that empowers every engineer at the company to do the best work of their careers.

Our guiding principles:

• Strong opinions, weakly held – approach engineering decisions with objectivity, navigating quickly to the right balance between idealism and pragmatism
• Automate everything – if you have to do it twice, it should probably be a script. If you do it three times, it's a feature for the backlog. Everything-as-code.
• Simplicity is a feature – we prefer boring, reliable tech over the flavor-of-the-week, unless there's is a compelling reason to trial, pilot, and switch
• Ownership is absolute – we build it, we run it, we fix it.
• Ruthless transparency – we share our designs, our failures, and our successes transparently with the entire organisation.

The successful candidate will be based in London. Our offices are located at 1 Churchill Place and 7 Westferry Circus (new BPL office). We support a hybrid working pattern with 3 days per week office-based presence expected.