Principal Software Engineer - Squad Lead Engineer

About the role

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer who will lead a cross‑functional squad while staying hands‑on in building high‑quality, secure and observable software for our education electronic health record products. The role combines technical leadership, design, delivery planning and collaboration with product, architecture, QE, SRE and partner teams.

Key responsibilities

• Act as the first line of technical escalation for the squad’s services and components.
• Facilitate team ceremonies such as refinement, sprint planning, design reviews and ensure flow and outcomes.
• Translate product objectives into robust technical designs, acceptance criteria and decompose epics into implementable stories.
• Design and implement complex features, resolve critical bugs and drive performance improvements.
• Define and enforce Definition of Ready/Done, including code quality, automated test coverage, security checks and observability.
• Establish and maintain CI/CD pipelines, quality gates and branching/release strategies.
• Partner with reliability teams on SLOs, alerting, runbooks and incident response.

Required profile

• Proven experience leading through influence (tech lead, feature lead, guild lead or similar) across design, delivery and operations.
• Strong background in at least one domain such as distributed services, data platforms or high‑throughput web/mobile applications.
• Advanced knowledge of Agile/Lean practices, backlog refinement and risk‑based planning.
• Experience with test strategy, automation, CI/CD quality gates and release readiness.

Required skills

• Java/JVM, JavaScript/TypeScript.NET/C#, Python, C/C++.
• SQL, relational and non‑relational data stores, performance tuning and data modelling.
• CI/CD platforms, containers, cloud technologies, observability and monitoring.
• Secure coding, performance optimisation, reliability engineering and incident response.

What we offer

• Healthy work‑life balance with flexible working hours.
• Wellbeing initiatives, shared parental leave, study assistance and sabbaticals.
• Supportive culture that values trust, respect, collaboration, agility and quality.