Lead / Principal Engineer - Full Stack

Job description

A different kind of organisation High trust, transparency, and autonomy Small teams, high ownership, flat structures Radical compensation transparency Sense of ownership in collective success Work with exceptional people who deeply care about their craft The role As a Principal Consultant, you're often the first person a customer meets to brainstorm a business problem. You should be at home debating distributed systems with engineers and framing decisions with leadership. You'll frame the problem with customers, shape the approach with the team, provide technical direction, and stay hands-on through delivery. You will work in self-managing, experienced, small, and high-impact teams, solving hard problems. This is a consulting & tech delivery role and while you will not have direct reports, you will regularly influence teams, mentor practitioners, manage stakeholders, and guide organisations through complex technology and business decisions. What the work looks like We can't promise which problem you'll pick up, but the menu right now looks something like this: Redesign a ClickHouse schema so an ad buyer can query 85 billion rows in under two seconds, and discover that pre-exploding the rows 168x is actually the right answer. Keep a vehicle telemetry platform moving billions of messages a day without the Kafka consumers falling over. Build the engineering spine of a mobile wallet used by more than two billion people across four continents. Ship the data product behind peer-review submissions for one of the world's largest scientific publishers. The list changes every quarter. The pattern doesn't: data-heavy, distributed, and often sitting on top of something that already exists and isn't perfect. What you'll do Frame Problems & Propose Solutions Help customers find the right problem before jumping to a solution. Facilitate discovery sessions, architecture reviews, and technical workshops. Translate business goals into a technology strategy and an execution plan. Lead Through Technical Excellence Stay hands-on; contribute directly to design, architecture, implementation, and review. Make pragmatic calls balancing business needs, engineering quality, and delivery timelines. Guide teams to build scalable, resilient, secure systems and the practices that keep them that way. Influence, Advise, and align Act as a trusted advisor on technology and investment decisi…