Principal Software Engineer

Lead Software Engineer

£75,000 to £85,000 + Private Healthcare + Enhanced Pension

Southampton (Hybrid, 4 days per week in the office)

Are you a senior software engineer looking to take end to end technical leadership of a complex, real-time distributed platform that integrates directly with mission-critical hardware used in security and critical infrastructure environments?

This is a principal-level technical role within a specialist engineering business developing a real-world platform that ingests, processes and surfaces live telemetry from radiation detection systems deployed in highly sensitive locations. The software underpins real-time monitoring, alerting and operational decision-making, where performance, reliability and security are non-negotiable.

You will lead the technical direction of a TypeScript-based microservices platform, remaining hands-on across backend services while also owning a large Angular enterprise application used by customers in the field. Working closely with a capable onshore team and an established offshore function, you will shape architecture, standards and delivery across the full software lifecycle.

This role suits an experienced engineer who enjoys deep technical ownership, architectural responsibility and building systems that have genuine real-world impact.

The Role:

*Technical leadership of a TypeScript-based, microservices platform.

*Leading development of a large Angular front-end used for real-time dashboards, monitoring and alerting

*Designing and optimising data models across PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch and Redis

*Owning CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure delivered across on-prem, cloud and hybrid deployments using Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform and Ansible

*Leading and mentoring onshore and offshore engineers while setting technical standards

The Person

*Strong experience building and owning distributed, microservices-based systems

*Strong experience with containerisation and infrastructure as code (IaaC)

*Proven background working with multiple database technologies in performance-critical systems

*Comfortable operating in Linux,, security-constrained or regulated environments

*Strong DevSecOps mindset with CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code exposure

*Confident influencing technical direction within senior engineering teams