We’re accepting applications for the position of Principal (or Expert Specialist) Software Engineer. As the Principal Software Engineer, you will serve as a strategic technical leader, responsible for shaping the company’s software engineering vision and ensuring the delivery of high-quality, scalable, and secure software solutions. Operating at an executive level, you will influence technology strategy, lead architectural governance, and drive engineering excellence across internal teams, external suppliers, and key customers. You will also lead the development and execution of Cloud-native microservice integration platform strategy and establish a high-performing internal agile development capability to support targeted business initiatives.
Duties and Responsibilities:
- Defining and driving the long term technical vision and architectural roadmap for bespoke software assets aligned to business and digital transformation goals
- Serving as a trusted advisor to Executive Leadership on emerging technologies, innovation opportunities, and technical risk management
- Championing a culture of engineering excellence, innovation, and continuous improvement across the organisation
- Determining and codifying architectural patterns, integration standards, coding standards, code quality assurance, automated testing, and DevOps deployment paradigms
- Championing the use of artificial intelligence driven development platforms in house and by suppliers to accelerate innovation and reduce time to market for bespoke solutions
- Collaborating with the Chief Technology Officer and Executive Team to define and execute the long term technical strategy
- Translating business goals requiring bespoke software solutions into robust technology roadmaps and system architectures
- Leading large scale, cross functional initiatives that directly impact company growth and innovation
- Acting as a key advisor to Senior Management on emerging technologies, software best practices, and competitive trends
- Representing bespoke software systems engineering in executive discussions, board meetings, and investor briefings when required
- Participating in relevant governance forums
- Leading the design, development, and evolution of the cloud native microservice platform for integration services
- Ensuring the platform is robustly engineered to meet defined resilience and availability key performance indicators
- Embedding automated quality assurance, functional testing, and deployment capabilities in line with DevOps best practices
- Collaborating with Infrastructure and DevOps teams to ensure seamless continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline integration and operational readiness
- Building and leading a small, high performing internal development team focused on delivering targeted, high impact initiatives
- Fostering a truly agile culture, enabling rapid iteration, continuous delivery, and close alignment with business stakeholders
- Providing technical leadership, mentorship, and architectural guidance to internal developers, ensuring delivery of high quality, maintainable code
- Leading the development of small scale proof of concepts
- Engaging with external software suppliers at an executive level to ensure alignment with technical strategy and delivery expectations
- Providing technical leadership, mentorship, and architectural guidance to external developers, ensuring delivery of high quality, maintainable code
- Ensuring all intellectual property is secured in line with contemporary best practices
- Participating in the contracting of bespoke software assets, managed services contracts, and support contracts
- Enabling Build Operate and Transfer operating models
- Driving continuous improvement of non functional aspects including security, performance and availability, logging and monitoring, failure handling, and configurability
- Driving continuous improvement in operational outcomes through the deployment of observability tooling covering metrics, logging and log inspection, and telemetry
- Ensuring performance testing is performed in accordance with architectural change
- Maintaining a registry of technical debt and working with management to drive improvements resulting in a measurable return on investment such as a 30 % reduction in incidents
- Engaging directly with key enterprise and mobile virtual network operator customers at an executive level to understand their strategic objectives and technical requirements
- Leading Joint Application Design sessions with customer technical teams when necessary to timeously co create end to end integration solutions that directly address customer requirements
- Ensuring solutions deliver optimal performance, scalability, and a superior experience for mobile virtual network operator subscribers and enterprise solutions
- Architecting and designing complex, distributed systems that meet high scalability, security, and reliability standards
- Driving innovation in software design, development, and operational excellence
- Performing critical code and architecture reviews to ensure technical excellence and compliance with standards
- Overseeing technical debt management and guiding long term system evolution
- Leading or contributing to key technology proof of concepts and high impact prototypes
- Collaborating with Business and Technology teams to deliver cohesive, customer centric solutions
- Influencing and aligning cross functional teams on architectural decisions, technical direction, and delivery timelines
- Representing Information Technology in strategic planning, budgeting, and governance forums
- Working closely with Product Management, Architecture, Operations, and suppliers to align technical solution designs with business outcomes
- Providing executive level guidance during planning, prioritisation, and resource allocation
- Ensuring effective communication of technical vision and decisions across the organisation
- Mentoring and coaching senior engineers, staff engineers, engineering managers, and technical leads across multiple teams, fostering a high performance engineering culture
- Leading by example in technical execution, problem solving, and cross team collaboration
- Supporting talent acquisition and development through hiring, coaching, and succession planning
- Building and fostering a culture of technical excellence, accountability, and collaboration
- Facilitating knowledge sharing, career growth, and continuous learning within the engineering organisation
- Establishing and enforcing software development standards, tools, and processes
- Overseeing system performance and reliability engineering and participating in incident response initiatives while driving improvement opportunities identified during incidents
- Implementing metrics and key performance indicators to measure engineering impact and software quality
- Promoting DevOps, continuous integration and continuous delivery, and cloud native best practices
Minimum Requirements:
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
- 15+ years’ experience in the telecommunications sector with a specific focus on deep understanding of mobile telco BSS and OSS systems
- 15+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, with at least 10 years in a senior software development role, and/or system architect role
- Proven experience leading large-scale software architecture and development initiatives, including vendor-delivered solutions
- Demonstrated ability in building and leading agile internal development teams
- Expertise in cloud-native architectures, microservices, integration platforms, and DevOps automation
- Strong understanding of business transactions, failure modes, error handling, and subsequent recovery modes
- Demonstrated ability to engage with both external suppliers and strategic customers at an executive level
- Exceptional communication with a proven ability to present complex technical concepts to non-technical executives’ negotiation
- Familiarity with enterprise architecture frameworks (e.g., TOGAF) and governance models
- AWS experience mandatory, GCP and Azure experience advantageous
- Experience with Springboot, Kubernetes, Java, C#, Github, Helm, Kafka, Oracle/MySQL/Postgres, Grafana and Open Telemetry