Job Title - Principal Engineer (SC Cleared)
Day Rate - Up to £545 a day inside IR35
Clearance - SC Clearance required
On Call - Required as part of a 24/7 L3 support rota
Contract Length - 12 months (with scope to extend)
Role Overview
The Principal Engineer will operate as a senior technical leader within a public sector digital programme, responsible for guiding multiple engineering teams delivering business-critical services. The role combines hands-on technical leadership, architectural oversight, and mentoring, while working closely with senior stakeholders to ensure high-quality, secure, and compliant delivery.
Key Responsibilities
Lead and mentor multiple engineering teams, promoting best practices and continuous improvement
Provide technical leadership across complex systems and architectures
Engage with stakeholders across business and technology to align delivery outcomes
Own and assure technical decisions, including risk mitigation and compliance.
Support backlog refinement, user story preparation, and sprint planning
Oversee development, testing, and deployment of high-availability services
Support incident, change, service request, and problem management processes
Participate in on-call L3 support for live services
Essential Skills and Experience
Demonstrable leadership of multiple engineering teams
Strong stakeholder engagement and communication skills
Object-oriented analysis and design expertise
In-depth experience with a fourth-generation programming language
Proven mentoring and coaching capability
Desirable Skills and Experience
Strong Back End development experience with Java or C#
Spring Boot, REST APIs, microservices architecture
AWS cloud services and DevOps practices
Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Helm, Git
Front End technologies including JavaScript and modern frameworks
Strong testing discipline including TDD, unit, integration, and end-to-end testing
Relational databases, ideally PostgreSQL
Experience supporting live services in a 24/7 operational environment
Additional Information
Systems operate continuously and require on-call participation
Role operates within established public sector delivery and governance frameworks