Principal Engineer

At Bazaarvoice, we create smart shopping experiences. Through our expansive global network, product-passionate community & enterprise technology, we connect thousands of brands and retailers with billions of consumers. Our solutions enable brands to connect with consumers and collect valuable user-generated content, at an unprecedented scale. This content achieves global reach by leveraging our extensive and ever-expanding retail, social & search syndication network. And we make it easy for brands & retailers to gain valuable business insights from real-time consumer feedback with intuitive tools and dashboards. The result is smarter shopping: loyal customers, increased sales, and improved products.   The problem we are trying to solve : Brands and retailers struggle to make real connections with consumers. It's a challenge to deliver trustworthy and inspiring content in the moments that matter most during the discovery and purchase cycle. The result? Time and money spent on content that doesn't attract new consumers, convert them, or earn their long-term loyalty.   Our brand promise : closing the gap between brands and consumers.   Founded in 2005, Bazaarvoice is headquartered in Austin, Texas with offices in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.   It’s official: Bazaarvoice is a Great Place to Work in the US , Australia, India, Lithuania, France, Germany and the UK

!
The Ideal Candidate   We are looking for a top-notch Principal Software Engineer to join the Bazaarvoice team in Belfast, UK. We are big believers in teamwork, knowledge sharing, and continuous learning.   The ideal candidate is self-motivated, extremely curious, a strong communicator, patient, and highly enthusiastic about driving cross-team collaboration to meet our growth objectives. Beyond designing and implementing traditional distributed, fault-tolerant systems, you will be a visionary champion leading our agentic transformation. This means you will fundamentally shift our engineering culture and architecture from a paradigm of engineers writing manual code to an advanced model where engineers design, orchestrate, and manage autonomous AI agents.    

Agentic Transformation Leadership: Spearhead the transition from traditional code generation to agentic workflows. Define the architecture, guardrails, and patterns for how engineers build and manage AI agents to automate and scale our development lifecycle.

Individual Contributor: Remain hands-on and able to code, build prototypes, and architect agent workflows as needed.

Technical Ownership: Assume technical ownership of the security, quality, scale, and performance of products delivered from our Belfast hub (collaborating closely with our global engineering teams).

Cloud Architecture: Oversee architectures, designs, and delivery of products built and deployed on AWS.

Global Influence: Actively influence architectures, designs, and standards for the global product development team.

Innovation & Roadmaps: Champion innovation and continuous improvements across the engineering organization , identifying and creating technology roadmaps that lean heavily into AI and automation.

Prototyping: Develop prototypes and proofs-of-concept in support of AI/agentic technology recommendations.

Talent & Mentorship: Assist in recruiting and hiring top talent per organizational needs , while guiding, mentoring, and evaluating highly capable technical talent to prepare them for an agent-driven ecosystem.

15+ years of overall relevant software engineering experience, with 8+ years specifically within world-class product companies.

Full-Stack Capabilities: 10+ years of strong full-stack software development experience.

SaaS Architecture: 5+ years of experience architecting, designing, and building high-scale, high-performance SaaS products.

Cloud Expertise: 5+ years of cloud experience.

Agentic & AI Vision: Proven understanding of Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt engineering, vector databases, and AI agent frameworks (e.g., Claude Code, LangChain, custom agent orchestration), with a clear vision of how to shift engineering from manual coding to agent management.

Communication & Collaboration: Strong communication and influencing skills across multiple geographic locations , alongside a proven track record of cross-functional collaboration.

Exposure to Big Data environments – data processing / analytics.

Experience working  within the Ecommerce space.