Principal Developer – Active SC Required

£600 per day (Inside IR35)
6 Month Contract
Remote Working | Occasional Travel to London

We’re looking for a Principal Developer to join a major engineering programme delivering large-scale, cloud-native systems within AWS.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role suited to an experienced engineer who enjoys remaining close to the code while helping shape technical direction across multiple teams. You’ll play a key role in designing, building and supporting resilient microservices-based solutions, contributing to architectural decisions, technical governance and live service operations.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Leading the design and development of large-scale cloud-native applications.
• Delivering distributed, event-driven microservices-based solutions.
• Providing technical leadership and direction across multiple teams.
• Collaborating with architects, security specialists and senior stakeholders.
• Acting as a technical authority, supporting complex technical decision-making.
• Driving engineering standards, quality assurance and best practice.
• Contributing to architecture, solution design and technical governance.
• Supporting production services, incident management and live operations.
• Ensuring solutions are resilient, observable and scalable.
• Delivering complex implementation work while maintaining strong stakeholder engagement.
• Producing and maintaining technical documentation.
• Supporting the continuous improvement of engineering capability and delivery processes.

Essential Skills

Java & Software Engineering

• Strong commercial Java development experience.
• Spring Boot.
• Maven.
• REST and SOAP services.
• Experience delivering large-scale enterprise systems handling high transaction volumes.
• Strong understanding of software engineering best practices and modern development approaches.

AWS & Cloud-Native Development

• AWS.
• S3.
• SQS.
• SNS.
• Step Functions.
• EventBridge.
• Event Sourcing.
• Experience delivering distributed and asynchronous systems.
• Cloud-native application development.

Architecture & Engineering

• Microservices architecture.
• Event-driven architecture.
• Distributed systems design.
• Building resilient and observable systems.
• Architecture and solution design experience.

Containers & Platform Engineering

• Docker.
• Docker Compose.
• Kubernetes.
• Containerised application delivery and support.

Leadership & Operations

• Technical leadership across multiple teams.
• Technical governance.
• Architectural decision support.
• Stakeholder engagement.
• Production support.
• Incident management.
• Live service operations.
• Experience acting as a technical authority.

Security

• Active SC Clearance.

Desirable Skills

• Python.
• Bash.
• Node.js.
• TypeScript.
• LocalStack.
• AWS AppConfig.
• AWS API Gateway.
• Lambda Authorizer.
• Terraform.
• Helm.
• Kafka / AWS MSK.
• Secrets Management.
• Authentication and Authorisation.
• Certificate Management.

Ideal Candidate

You’ll be an experienced Principal Developer with a strong background in Java and AWS, capable of leading complex technical delivery while remaining hands-on. You’ll have experience working on large-scale distributed systems, influencing architectural decisions and supporting live services within complex engineering environments.