Job Description:
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 has deep technical expertise and specialises in solving complex problems that arise in the development of digital products. This role plays an influential role, supercharging a team and elevating those around them. You are a senior practitioner who works on influencing technology adoption to enable Red Badger value propositions. You will work closely with Technical and Delivery Leads, providing expert input into the technical direction of a client project, ensuring that due consideration is given to ambitious technology choices and best practice. You will consult with our clients on your specific areas of technical knowledge and help them understand the benefits of new technology and industry innovations.
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 providing high value consulting services in a focussed technical audit as they are supercharging a cross functional product team who are being brought up to speed on new technologies as they deliver.
Key Responsibilities
Discipline expertise:
- Ensuring quality through coaching, pairing, reviewing code
- Ensuring lean approach to software engineering and focus on delivering maximum value with minimal effort
- Advocating for simplicity in design approach, ways of working and tool choice
- Advocating innovative approach / use of new technology where appropriate
- Deep technical expertise and teaching mindset
- Upskilling Red Badger software engineers in new technologies and approaches
- Contributing to raising technology discipline standards within Red Badger
Industry focus:
- Keeping abreast of industry trends and opportunities
- Thought leadership and continually evolving best practice
- Organising and speaking at events / meetups
Influencing our clients:
- Consulting on areas of technology expertise
- Coaching client technology stakeholders
- 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 with multiple programming languages, in web, mobile and/or frontend and multiple paradigms (e.g. declarative, functional, object oriented…)
- Experience with establishing good engineering practice focused on lean, cross-discipline, continuous delivery
- Ability to influence senior client stakeholders and support teams with technology and process enablers to support continuous delivery and DevOps ways of working
- Experience with cloud infrastructure such as Azure, GCP, AWS, and understanding of progressive ways of managing infrastructure, such as infrastructure-as-code, cluster orchestration tools, etc.
- Experience in designing system-level architecture and navigating trade-offs in web based systems (e.g. Microservices, REST APIs, CQRS)
- Awareness of design and testing strategies to enable gradual evolution of systems over time
- Good understanding of data storage approaches and tools and trade-offs involved (RBDMSs, key-value stores, column stores, log storage, …)
- Good understanding of applying cryptography in software development (e.g. TLS, PKI, HMAC, hashing algorithms, etc.)
- Good understanding of algorithms and data structures to solve distributed computing problems (e.g. content-based addressing, immutable data structures, CRDTs, consensus protocols, merkle DAGs, etc.)
It’d be amazing if you can also:
- An understanding of information security including common attack vectors, awareness of relevant regulation and restrictions
- Experience with running live services with significant volume of users and establishing appropriate SLOs and error budgets for services and applications
Company Benefits
- Annual £2K training budget
- Generous Pension
- Group Life Insurance
- Income Replacement Benefit
- Critical Illness Cover
- Private Medical Insurance
- Your choice of hardware and mobile phone
- Matched (pre-tax) charity GAYE donations
- Open source contribution scheme
Interview Process
- Screening call with the recruitment team
- Tech call with an engineer
- Coding challenge
- Final stage interview
