Principal Software Engineer - £excellent

Principal Software Engineer

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our digital product delivery function.

Red Badger delivers high quality digital products using a lean delivery process and multidisciplinary, cross-functional teams.

The Principal Software Engineer is a senior technical leader with deep expertise in building and operating digital products, particularly within complex client environments and multi-team projects. This role is instrumental in shaping the technical direction of client engagements and plays a key part in delivering high-quality outcomes through strategic influence, hands-on support, and deep domain knowledge.

You will collaborate closely with Principal Product and Delivery roles, as well as Technical and Delivery Leads, to ensure that technology choices align with both client goals and Red Badger's value propositions. You will engage with senior stakeholders to consult and influence on topics such as technology adoption, continuous delivery, team structure, deployment strategy, and organizational policy. Your ability to guide clients through emerging technologies and industry best practice will help create the conditions for teams to succeed with autonomy and impact.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you elevate those around you by supercharging delivery teams, mentoring others, and embedding technical excellence at every level. You bring thought leadership, pragmatism, and curiosity to solving complex problems, and are trusted to represent Red Badger in high-level client conversations with confidence and clarity.

There is also an internal quality aspect to the role which involves contributing to the elevation of technical standards across Red Badger, and how we represent ourselves externally to the industry.

Hands-on work is expected to be the majority of the role - demonstrating by doing, but also be prepared to get involved in thought leadership, sharing your knowledge with other badgers, and high value consulting activities.

The Principal Software Engineer works across a range of account sizes but will be equally comfortable coordinating technology across a multi-team programme as they are providing high value consulting services to define client technology strategy or running proof of concept work streams for senior technology stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

• Discipline expertise
• Supporting lean approach to software delivery
• Providing architectural framework and solution design
• Advocating innovative approach / use of new technology
• Ensuring quality through coaching, pairing, reviewing code
• Advocating for simplicity in design approach, ways of working and tool choice
• Deep technical expertise and teaching mindset
• Upskilling Red Badger software engineers
• Contributing to raising technology discipline standards within Red Badger
• Collaborative leadership
• Feed into account level technology leadership / governance
• Contributing to the overall success of the Red Badger client engagement
• Potentially leading multiple technology teams across a programme of work
• Aligning Badger / client teams on appropriate processes & tooling
• Influencing our clients
• Consulting on areas of technology expertise
• Contributing to new business pitches and thought leadership
• Operating as trusted advisor consulting on client technology strategy, technology roadmap
• Coaching senior client technology stakeholders
• Industry focus
• Keeping abreast of industry trends and opportunities
• Thought leadership and continually evolving best practice
• Organizing and speaking at events / meetups
• Supporting our team
• Line management of senior engineering team members
• Contributing to the technical discipline within Red Badger
• Helping to build a high performing and motivated Badger engineering team

Your experience

• It'd be great if you have
• Experience in a consulting environment with client engagements
• Ability to influence senior client stakeholders
• Experience with multiple programming languages
• Experience with cloud infrastructure
• Experience with setting up modern CI/CD pipelines
• Experience in designing system-level architecture
• An understanding of information security
• Experience in design and testing strategies
• Good understanding of data storage approaches
• Good understanding of applying cryptography
• Good understanding of algorithms and data structures
• It'd be amazing if you can also
• An understanding of information security
• Experience with running live services
• Experience designing observability strategies