Principal Engineer

Principal Engineer

Central London (5 days in-office) | Base circa £150,000 + significant bonus + equity

We are partnering with a high-performance, institutional-grade digital markets business operating at global scale.

The engineering organisation supports trading-sensitive systems and real-time market data infrastructure processing extremely high volumes of requests every month.

They are now hiring a Principal Engineer to drive the next phase of architectural evolution.

Language is flexible (Java, Go, Python, Node) however, you must be willing to adopt Node.js quickly where required.

The Role

You will shape the evolution of distributed systems that:

• Handle very high request throughput
• Support real-time streaming and client-facing APIs
• Operate in 24/7 production environments
• Require strict consistency, ordering guarantees, and performance discipline

You will:

• Define and champion long-term technical direction across multiple services
• Design resilient, high-throughput distributed systems
• Lead cross-team technical initiatives
• Solve real production challenges around consistency, latency, and scalability
• Mentor senior engineers on advanced architectural trade-offs
• Raise engineering standards across observability, performance, and reliability

What They’re Looking For

• 8+ years backend engineering experience
• Proven Principal / Staff-level technical leadership
• Deep expertise in distributed systems
• Experience with both synchronous (REST APIs) and asynchronous (event-driven / streaming) systems
• Strong background in high-availability, 24/7 production environments
• Experience in financial, trading, or other high-scale regulated systems is highly desirable

This role suits engineers who:

• Think beyond code
• Drive change rather than maintain the status quo
• Improve imperfect systems instead of criticising them
• Are comfortable navigating ambiguity

The Environment

• Institutional engineering culture
• High standards, high ownership
• Collaborative, in-office model (Central London)
• Unfortunately, no sponsorship available

Compensation

• Base circa £150,000
• Strong bonus structure
• Equity with liquidity potential
• Realistic total compensation £190k–£220k+