Principal Software Engineer

Our Principal Software Engineers are responsible for leading and delivering strategically significant, complex client engagements across our portfolio of clients.

We believe that great delivery stems from a thorough understanding of our clients and their needs, strong discipline skills and subject matter expertise, excellent leadership and a clear vision of lasting and effective change in a public sector environment. We expect our Principal Software Engineers to bring all of that and enthuse our delivery teams with the same passion.

The successful candidate will lead the Software Engineering aspects of our client engagements while overseeing the wider delivery within the account (or industry) when appropriate.

In addition, our Principal Software Engineers are responsible for engaging with our clients to understand their challenges and build lasting, trusted advisor relationships. They will also oversee multiple, concurrent client deliveries to help ensure quality and drive the sharing of best practice across our engagements and industries.

Our Principal Software Engineers are members of the Software Engineering Practice leadership team with the responsibility to develop the capability of the practice to meet business needs and to accelerate the growth of the practice, their account and the wider business.

The right person for this role will do this by combining their technical discipline/craft experience, leadership skills and industry network with Made Tech's unparalleled experience of delivering digital services and digital transformation for the Public Sector.

Key responsibilities

• Collaborate with clients to understand their needs, provide solution advice in your role as a trusted advisor and shape solutions that leverage Made Tech's wider capabilities and credentials
• Assess project performance as a part of the billable delivery team, Quality Assure (QA) the deliverables and outcomes, and ensure client satisfaction. Coach and mentor team members as well as providing direction to enable them to achieve their engagement outcomes and to develop their careers
• Act as a Technical Authority (of your appropriate capability) to provide oversight and ensure alignment with internal and industry best practices. Ensure engagement experience is captured and used to improve standards and contribute to Made Tech knowledge
• Participate in business development activities, including bids and pre-sales within the account, industry and practice. Coach team members on their contributions and oversee the relevant technical aspects of the proposal submission
• Undertake people management responsibilities, including performance reviews and professional development of your engagement and practice colleagues
• Serve as a thought leader within Made Tech, our account engagements and the wider public sector and represent the company at industry events

Skills, knowledge and expertise

Clients

• Understanding of the issues and challenges that the public sector faces in delivering services that make the best use of data and digital capabilities, transforming legacy infrastructure, and taking an innovative and user-centric approach
• Ability to innovate and take learnings from the commercial sector, other countries and advances in technology and apply them to UK Public Sector challenges to create tangible solutions for our clients
• Experience building trusted advisor relationships with senior client stakeholders within the public sector.

Leadership

• Experience of building and leading high performing, consulting teams and creating the leveraged engagements to provide a cost-effective, profitable, successful client-facing delivery
• Leadership of bids and solution shaping to produce compelling proposals that help Made Tech win new business and grow the industry
• Experience of managing third-party partnerships and suppliers (in conjunction with Made Tech colleagues) to provide a consolidated and seamless delivery team to clients.

People management

• Ambassadors of belonging at Made Tech, advocating and championing organisational commitments and priorities, recognising their role in modelling the way and embodying our values.
• Compelling communicators, ensuring key information is swiftly cascaded, understood, and feedback gathered and shared.
• Using their coaching skills to enable people to be their best, regularly and routinely providing meaningful, positive and constructive feedback.
• Make decisions that support the best interests of the business while recognising that our people are its foundation. Strive to achieve the best outcomes for individuals through persuasive and persistent efforts, ensuring these decisions uphold both the short- and long-term sustainability of the business.
• Inspire innovation and spark curiosity, encourage people to be positively disruptive and challenge the status quo.
• Seek collective success above personal glory, strive to ensure a constant culture of inclusion, trust and transparency.
• Lead your direct reports and positively influence the wider organisation as an inspiring people manager in line with our people manager objectives and key results.

Practice

• Experience in delivering complex and difficult engagements that span multiple capabilities for user-facing digital and data services in the public sector
• Experience in identifying opportunities based on client needs and developing targeted solutions to progress the development of the opportunity
• Experience of working with sales professionals and commercial responsibility for strategic organisational goals.

Software Engineering

• A deep knowledge of a wide range of different languages, frameworks, stacks and design patterns.
• Deep experience with containerisation and orchestration tools (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes), CI/CD, TDD, Agile working and modern software engineering practices in general.
• Experience working within multidisciplinary teams with product, design, and technical disciplines all successfully collaborating.
• Advanced understanding of at least one cloud platform - able to spin up an infrastructure with IAC and justify the choices made in creating it.
• Very strong technical understanding of the benefits, drawbacks and operating principals of the major databases, queues and other infrastructure services.
• A proven track record of consultancy, having been treated by clients as a recognised technical advisor.
• Experience working closely with technical and non-technical stakeholders, able to confidently and politely advance an argument in favour of a technical choice, resolving conflicts and finding common ground.
• A strongly evidenced commitment to self-development and career growth.

Job benefits

Support in applying

If you need this job description in another format, or other support in applying, please email [email protected].

We believe we can use tech to make public services better. We also believe this can happen best when our own team represents the society that actually uses the services we work on. We’re collectively continuing to grow a culture that is happy, healthy, safe and inspiring for people of all backgrounds and experiences, so we encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply for roles with us.

When you apply, we’ll put you in touch with a talent partner who can help with any needs or adjustments we may need to make to help with your application. This includes alternative formats for documents, the time allotted for interviews and any other needs. We also welcome any feedback on how we can improve the experience for future candidates.

We’re committed to building a happy, inclusive and diverse workforce. You can get a sense of what it’s like working here from our blog, where we talk about mental health, communities of practice and neurodiversity (as well as our client work and best practice).

Like many organisations, we use Slack to foster a sense of community and connection. As well as special interest groups such as music, food and pets, we also have 10+ Slack channels dedicated to specific communities, allies, and identities as well as dedicated learning spaces called communities of practice (COPs).

Benefits

We've recently introduced a flexible benefit platform which includes a Smart Tech scheme, Cycle to work scheme, and an individual benefits allowance which you can invest in a Health care cash plan or Pension plan. We’re also big on connection and have an optional social and wellbeing calendar of events for all employees to join should they choose to.

Here are some of our most popular benefits listed below:

✈️ 30 days Holiday - we offer 30 days of paid annual leave + bank holidays!

👶 Flexible Parental Leave - we offer flexible parental leave options

👩‍💻 Remote Working - we offer part time remote working for all our staff

🤗 Paid counselling - we offer paid counselling as well as financial and legal advice.

An increasing number of our customers are specifying a minimum of SC (security check) clearance in order to work on their projects. As a result, we're looking for all successful candidates for this role to have eligibility.Eligibility for SC requires 5 years' of continuous UK residency. Please note that if at any point during the interview process it is apparent that you may not be eligible for SC, we won't be able to progress your application and we will contact you to let you know why.