Principal Software Engineer (Java)

Description

The company builds an AI-assisted scenario planning and analysis platform that helps large businesses make decisions faster and stay ahead of rivals.

The platform is used by more than 2,400 companies worldwide, including many Fortune 50 firms.

The team is organised around a shared focus on customer success and a strong team culture.

This is an Engineer IV role. The company runs its proprietary core technology on enterprise cloud infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for platform capabilities behind enterprise API gateways, edge routing and developer tooling.
• Design, build and own core features from first design through to production.
• Build high-throughput backend engines that handle request orchestration and tenant isolation, and that serve thousands of tenants and tens of thousands of users.
• Build API-first solutions that keep tenants separated while they share the platform.
• Work with architects and senior engineers across the Platform Experience domain to align implementation patterns on complex work such as Vanity URLs, JWT auth flows and cross-service proxying.
• Advance the deployment infrastructure by promoting GitOps practices (ArgoCD, Helm) and highly available containerized orchestration.
• Improve observability, add intelligent rate limiting, and resolve concurrency problems such as database locks and connection starvation.
• Write Java and Kotlin code and shape the technical thinking behind it, so backend microservices work cleanly with UI components, including fixing CORS and distributed edge proxy issues.
• Coach engineers across global teams through design reviews, pair programming and hands-on guidance.

Requirements

• Extensive experience building software for enterprise-scale, high-throughput platforms or data-heavy systems.
• Knowledge of modern AI tools, including agentic programming patterns and LLM-assisted workflows, and the ability to use them to speed up platform work and developer output.
• Deep skill in backend JVM languages, Java and/or Kotlin, with a solid grasp of distributed systems internals.
• A record of delivering API-first infrastructure, API gateways such as Traefik, and edge routing that stays reliable at 2K+ requests per second.
• Hands-on work with Kubernetes, containerized deployments and complex CI/CD pipelines, with good familiarity with GitOps, ArgoCD and fast release workflows.
• Solid understanding of event-driven architecture, real-time data processing and large-scale database transaction scopes.
• Comfort balancing rapid prototyping with long-term sustainability and quality, with a bias for action: you try and iterate rather than wait for complete information.
• Strong communication skills, able to align global teams and turn complex ideas into clear RFCs and architecture designs that build consensus.
• Preferred: experience shaping architecture and platform strategy at enterprise scale, weighing trade-offs across hybrid and cloud-agnostic infrastructure.
• Preferred: a polyglot outlook that picks the right technology for each problem, and openness to React, Python or Go where needed.
• Preferred: curiosity about new technologies and approaches to edge routing and platform enablement.
• Preferred: enjoy mentoring others and raising engineering culture, while staying modest about your own ego.
• Preferred: comfortable working in distributed teams, collaborating asynchronously and building consensus across domains.

Conditions

Hybrid role based in York, UK, with on-site work at the York office two days a week.

The company welcomes people of all backgrounds regardless of gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, age, neurodiversity, disability status, citizenship or other differences.