Principal Backend Engineer

Role - Principal Backend Engineer

Salary - £80,000 – £95,000

Location - Manchester

Work Pattern - Hybrid

The Role

We’re looking for an experienced Principal Backend Engineer to join a growing engineering team working on a new, high-performance payments platform.

This is a hands-on role where you’ll remain heavily involved in software development while providing technical leadership across architecture, engineering standards, code quality and best practices.

You’ll work closely with senior engineers and other technical disciplines, taking ownership of features from design through to implementation, testing, deployment and ongoing support.

What you'll be doing

• Designing, building and shipping high-quality backend features.
• Working with asynchronous and event-driven systems.
• Providing technical guidance and mentoring to other engineers.
• Making key architectural and technical decisions.
• Writing clean, secure, well-tested and maintainable code.
• Reviewing code and helping establish engineering standards.
• Building and maintaining automated tests and CI/CD pipelines.
• Integrating third-party services and APIs.
• Working with cloud and platform engineers to build highly reliable systems.
• Using AI coding tools as part of your day-to-day development.
• Supporting the wider engineering team in adopting AI-assisted development effectively.
• Taking ownership of features throughout the full software development lifecycle.

The Essentials

• Strong commercial experience with Java, Kotlin or Scala.
• Proven experience designing and building backend/distributed systems.
• Strong experience with event-driven and asynchronous architectures.
• Strong database experience, such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, DynamoDB or Cosmos DB.
• Experience integrating third-party services and APIs.
• Strong understanding of testing, version control, CI/CD and secure coding practices.
• Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to technical standards.
• Comfortable working with a high degree of autonomy and ownership.
• Fluency with AI coding tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot or similar.

The Desirables

• Experience designing, building or maintaining payment platforms.
• Experience building platforms from the ground up.
• Experience working within regulated or high-trust environments.
• Cloud-native development across AWS, Azure or GCP.
• Docker, Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code.
• Experience establishing engineering standards and best practices.

What's on offer

• Extensive holiday allowance + Bank Holidays.
• Hybrid working from a Manchester office.
• Company pension scheme.
• Structured career development and ongoing learning support.
• The opportunity to have significant influence over architecture, engineering standards and technical direction.