Principal Software Engineer

• 10+ years of professional engineering experience, including designing and delivering large-scale, distributed systems.
• Proven track record of hands-on development across back-end (C#, ASP.NET) and front-end (ReactJS) environments.
• Extensive experience integrating AI/LLM technologies into production environments.
• Strong competence with SQL Server, T-SQL, performance tuning, caching (Redis), ElasticSearch/OpenSearch, and distributed systems patterns.
• Experience operating in Agile/Scrum and collaborating closely with Product, Delivery, QA, and DevOps.
• Strong Git and CI/CD experience (Bitbucket, TeamCity, Octopus Deploy).
• Real-world experience designing secure, scalable, resilient systems on AWS.
• Expert understanding of OOP, SOLID principles, design patterns, data structures, and algorithms.
• Deep knowledge of asynchronous processing, concurrency, distributed architectures, and high-volume transactional systems.
• Working knowledge of Docker, containerised workloads, and cloud-native best practices.
• Understanding of modern AI integration patterns: embeddings, vectors, RAG, prompt engineering, evaluation techniques, model safety.
• Strong familiarity with Atlassian tools (Jira, Confluence).
• Hands-on technical leader with a bias for action and ownership.
• Excellent communicator who can simplify complex systems for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Pragmatic, user-centric problem solver with strong attention to detail.
• Curious, innovative, and proactive in driving the organisation forward.
• Collaborative, empathetic team player who uplifts others.
• Strategic thinker who can balance immediate delivery with long-term architecture needs.

Technical Strategy, Architecture & Hands-On Delivery

• Design, build, and ship high-quality, production-grade software using C#, ASP.NET, ReactJS, Node.js, SQL Server, and AWS services.
• Serve as a hands-on architect/engineer— writing foundational code, delivering end to end features, validating technical approaches through prototypes and spikes, and leading design discussions.
• Maintain deep familiarity with our codebase and actively contribute to critical, high-impact features and refactoring initiatives.
• Define and uphold engineering standards across squads, including SOLID, design patterns, secure coding, and observability principles.
• Evaluate technical trade-offs, performance implications, and long-term maintainability to steer architectural direction.

AI Integration Ownership 

• Lead and implement AI-powered features across Interact’s ecosystem, to fuel value creation (eg. intelligent search, summarisation, classification, recommendation systems, generative capabilities, experience augmentation, insights generation, etc.)
• Develop secure and scalable AI integration layers using modern patterns (embeddings, RAG, vector databases, prompt orchestration, evaluation frameworks).
• Build and maintain AI-related services, APIs, and backend components—including telemetry, evaluation pipelines, and guardrails.
• Establish best practices for responsible AI, including privacy, compliance, red-teaming, fallback logic, and model governance.
• Partner with Product to prioritise AI initiatives and define measurable success metrics for user experience and business impact.
• Create reusable AI components, SDKs, documentation, and guidelines for wider engineering use.

Delivery Leadership Across Squads

• Lead cross-team initiatives, unblock complex technical challenges, and ensure architectural alignment across the organisation.
• Work closely with Product & Delivery Managers to refine requirements, shape roadmaps, and ensure predictable delivery.
• Break down complex problems and guide teams through execution—participating directly in coding when needed.

Engineering Excellence & Quality

• Champion testing excellence: author and maintain unit tests, integration tests, and Playwright E2E tests.
• Work closely with DevOps to optimise CI/CD pipelines (TeamCity, Octopus Deploy) and improve deployment reliability.
• Conduct in-depth code reviews, provide hands-on pairing, and ensure code quality across multiple squads.
• Optimise performance across APIs, databases, caching, distributed systems, and front-end rendering.

Platform Reliability, Security & Scalability

• Maintain hands-on involvement in resolving complex production issues, running post-mortems, and designing long-term solutions.
• Develop secure-by-default features and collaborate with Security to ensure AI and platform components meet compliance requirements.
• Contribute to scalable AWS infrastructure design and cost-efficient resource usage.

Mentorship, Influence & Culture

• Mentor engineers of all levels—especially Senior and Staff engineers—to elevate technical thinking and delivery quality.
• Facilitate design clinics, architecture reviews, and knowledge-sharing sessions, including AI education and literacy.
• Contribute to hiring pipelines through technical interviews and role calibrations.

Continuous Innovation

• Stay ahead of industry trends in AI, cloud, web engineering, and developer tooling.
• Initiate and lead innovation spikes, proofs-of-concept, technical evaluations, and platform enhancements.
• Promote continuous improvement and foster a culture of curiosity and craftsmanship.