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CreateFuture

Principal Engineer

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Software Development · Consultancy · Technology
Create Tomorrow, Together, Today
Active
over 6 months ago
Posted
a month ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
20 hours ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Back End
Experience level: Leadership
Core skills considered: Agile, APIs, Cloud Computing, Data Architecture, Data Pipelines
Other skills considered: Machine Learning, Python, Scrum, Software Architecture, Technical Direction

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

The bar has moved. Five years ago a strong engineer was measured by what they could build and how well they could mentor others to build it. Today, with Claude Code and agents, we produce quality work at a speed that would have looked superhuman in 2022.

What separates exceptional from good is no longer typing speed or local craftsmanship. It is the complete package: architecture, deep engineering foundations, communication, system thinking, and the judgement to direct both your own intelligence and AI toward outcomes that matter.

Exceptional people at this level are not the best implementer in the room; they are the person whose specifications, decisions, and review judgement compound into systems that work in production and that others (and agents) can build on. They are a force multiplier, they hold a room at the highest levels, and clients treat them as the SME by default.

This particular Principal seat sits on one of our largest iGaming engagements: sportsbook, casino and gaming platforms for a major client. You oversee a group of engineers and Tech Leads, line managing the leads, and you are the single named owner of what that group delivers: you size the work, shape the teams, and take the call. You lead by steering - reviewing the approach early, keeping the bar consistent across teams, and coaching leads to make the call themselves - and you stay close enough to the code that your authority with engineers comes from being one.


Your mindset

The mindset is the engine, and it is almost impossible to teach retrospectively. You are outcome obsessed, not output obsessed and you care whether the problem was actually solved - you resist the ego instinct to admire a clever solution and ask whether it was needed at all.

You are intellectually honest about uncertainty, taking a trust-but-verify approach and assuming the surprising bug is the one that will burn. You are deeply pragmatic, which matters at CreateFuture where pace counts: you have outgrown the religious wars about platforms, languages and patterns, you hold opinions loosely, and you decide for the systems in front of you, not the ones you wish you had.

You have a bias toward delivery: the smallest thing that works, then iterate, treating documents and meetings as means to that end.

And you are relentlessly curious beyond any immediate need, wanting to know how the database actually stores things or why a Claude Opus inference call costs what it does, which keeps you several layers ahead while the rest of the team is still reading the API docs.


AI as the accelerant

For a Principal to be truly exceptional, this is now already a first-class competency in your arsenal, not a side skill. An engineer who is brilliant by last year's standards but not fluent with AI is not exceptional in 2026. In practice that means:


Responsibilities

  • Setting AI up to succeed. You treat context engineering as a craft (the right files, specs, examples and constraints), and you architect systems with clean interfaces, good naming, machine-readable specs and knowledge bases so the codebase is a quality baseline AI can work on later. No separate ivory-tower architect required.
  • Reviewing and choosing well. You read far more code than you write, and your value is in the quality of review: catching the silent assumption, the security flaw, the architectural drift, knowing where models fail and looking there first. You pick the right tool for the job (Claude Code for a deep refactor, an inline assistant when that is enough, a sub-agent for parallel work, the right model for analysis versus generation)
  • Working with non-determinism. You see where AI moves the bottleneck and helps people left and right of you unblock the value stream. You build with AI components but know success is no longer a binary, reaching for evals, golden datasets, structured outputs and fallback paths as naturally as you reach for unit tests.

Technical breadth across the full stack

Exceptional means depth in at least one area but competence everywhere the system reaches.


Responsibilities

  • Backend: an instinct for distributed systems (what fails, what is eventually consistent, where queues back up), APIs that age well, thoughtful data modelling, and an understanding that languages are mostly syntax differences you can close with AI.
  • Cloud: cost-aware and security-aware by default, reaching for IaC, composing the primitives rather than stitching together managed services and hoping it works.
  • Data: modern pipelines, governance and lineage, increasingly vector stores and embeddings, with data quality treated as seriously as production code because garbage in, garbage out is far worse once AI features depend on it.
  • Web and mobile: past the framework arguments, with a clear view on what you would pick today, and able to build "good enough" front ends yourself with AI.

Full-stack here means seeing the platform as one system and knowing which levers matter most. It does not mean front-end work with a few Node.js servers.


The domain: iGaming

Depth in the domain is what lets you hold the room with the people who have run it for years.


Responsibilities

  • The mechanics: odds and pricing, third-party feed and provider integrations, the bet lifecycle from placement to settlement, wallets, bonusing and promotions.
  • Regulated markets: multi-jurisdiction compliance, responsible gambling, KYC, and the operational reality of running products under licence.
  • Live-sport scale: high concurrency, real-time data, and the traffic spikes that come with big sporting moments.

You will not need every corner of this on day one, but you know enough of it to be credible with the directors who own it.


System thinking, consulting and commercial judgement

At CreateFuture we work in a consultancy context, where many otherwise excellent IC engineers can struggle.

You know technology is roughly 30% of the picture; the rest is design, argument and reasoning, commercial and political acumen, and the clarity to frame outcomes for a COO, CTO, CIO or CEO in their own language.

You know when gold-plating is wasteful, you can name when a project's real problem is not technical and say so even when it is awkward, and you have a strong sense of what is durable versus what is fashion.

You are not the engineer who introduced the team to seven new technologies last year; you are the one who removed three and quietly made the remaining stack stronger.


Leadership mentality

Technical work is necessary but no longer sufficient. By default you raise the level of everyone around you, regardless of discipline.


Responsibilities

  • Lead the leads. You coach Tech Leads to own their team's scope, drive the dates and spot risk early, and you develop the people who could take your seat next.
  • Dive into the product. You learn its users and its pain points, and point teams at what is valuable to the business, not just what is asked for.
  • Communicate clearly and frequently (documents, decisions, post-mortems, design notes); the written artefact is the machine-readable context we can feed to AI later.
  • Make decisions and own them. You don't escalate everything or hoard control, and you are willing to be the benevolent dictator when it is your turn.
  • Mentor in AI fluency, not

Company Benefits

  • We believe our employees should enjoy their leave how and when they want, that’s why we give you 35 days (inc. bank holidays) to book when you wish
  • Support for your health and wellbeing with access to fast and effective private medical insurance with Vitality
  • Our enhanced maternity, paternity, adoption and shared parental leave ensures you get to spend quality time with your new family members
  • We ensure our employees feel more secure and supported with their finances by partnering with Bippit to provide confidential professional financial coaching, workshops and resources
  • Some of the latest tech equipment, including headphones and more, as well as a range of tools to do your job comfortably
  • If you like getting involved in social events at work, we host regular optional virtual and in-person events like cook-alongs, virtual quizzes and more
  • For the avid cyclists, take advantage of our cycle-to-work scheme
  • Through the wellbeing app, YuLife, you’ll get access to many benefits including group life insurance, a 24/7 EAP service and both physical and mental wellbeing support
  • Invest in your future by opting into our salary sacrifice pension scheme
Principal Engineer at CreateFuture
Position posted a month ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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