Principal Consultant - Software Technical Lead
Simple Machines, United Kingdom
Job Description
Simple Machines is seeking a senior engineer looking to take the next step in their career. The position is a Principal Consultant with a progression path to Solutions Lead, a role that goes beyond engineering to lead the proposal, design, and implementation of technical solutions, playing a key role in engaging with clients.
This full-time position is based in London and involves working as a consulting engineer on the development of data-driven platforms and products utilised by global brands.
This role presents a unique opportunity to work alongside a talented team. The members of this team have significant experience, having been employed by major global product, technology, and consulting firms, including but not limited to Facebook, PayPal, Google, Atlassian, Thoughtworks, and many others.
About the role
This position is suitable for an individual with experience as either a Staff or Principal engineer (or equivalent) who enjoys engaging with stakeholders, technical solution design, and directly implementing solutions and is now seeking career advancement.
The ideal candidate would have a diverse range of technical experience spanning different programming languages, libraries, databases and familiarity with cloud infrastructure.
Requirements
Your responsibilities as Principal Consultant will include:
- Software Design amp; Development: Defining, designing, and writing quality software.
- Best Practices and Design: Ensuring quality in our software through clean designs, adherence to best practices in technology, methods, architecture, and robust builds.
- Define Scope: Working with Simple Machines' project management team to understand business needs and create user stories.
Transition to Solutions Lead:
As you grow and familiarise yourself with consulting, you'll have the opportunity to transition to a Solutions Lead role, where you'll steer projects, engage with clients, and provide technical leadership. This transition will involve progressively taking on the following responsibilities:
- Solution Design and Architecture: Designing software solutions spanning multiple systems and technologies. These designs will encompass software and enterprise architecture, cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, and capturing business requirements.
- Technical Leadership: Providing technical direction to the engineering team.
- Client Collaboration: Working with client architecture, engineering, and business teams. You will help drive decision-making and serve as an expert across diverse technology stacks.
- Client Success: Ensuring the success of our solutions for clients by verifying they meet business needs, and that outcomes can be measured and align with client expectations.
- Shaping Engagements: Supporting projects from their inception, assisting clients in formulating early ideas and setting the foundations for their technical delivery.
- Project and Team Leadership: Collaborating with the client and Simple Machines' product and delivery teams to successfully organise and deliver projects.
The type of experience we’re looking for:
- Technology Understanding: A comprehensive knowledge of technologies utilised across solutions is required. This encompasses cloud infrastructure, client-side and server-side applications, and data management (including databases, pipelines, etc.). Specific experience with infrastructure, a JVM-based language, React based web apps and data engineering is also essential.
- Holistic Design Approach: This includes the integration of various aspects such as the business domain, user experience, enterprise architecture, both backend and frontend application architecture, and infrastructure.
- Client Interaction: Experience working directly with clients is beneficial, as a consultant or another technical role with occasional exposure to clients.
- Communication Skills: The ability to communicate technical subjects to a broad audience comprising both business and technical stakeholders is necessary.
- Collaboration with Data Science Teams: Experience in working alongside Data Scientists and in Machine Learning or AI capabilities would be considered a bonus.
- Flexibility in approach: Our clients use a wide range of technologies, in many contexts, and our team brings a broad expertise. The ability to adapt solutions and thinking to each situation is essential.
- Ambitious
- Self-starter / initiative
- Corporate and start up experience
The day to day
Typical daily activities would include work such as:
- Working on a client project (hybrid work, 2 days a week on site) with a cross functional Simple Machines team
- Collaborating with Simple Machines Product Managers t