Principal Engineer

A key leadership role within the technology team responsible for driving the technical direction of the business outcomes, ensuring alignment with focus area goals, and ensuring the delivery of high-quality software that meets customer expectations.

In this role, you will lead a growing team of engineers, working in cross-functional product-focused crews to establish effective ways of working, architectural standards, and best practices while promoting autonomy. 

The role will be responsible for our Engineering strategy, approach, and execution across all our technology crews covering the full range of technology systems and activities. As well as maturing our existing capability, the Principal Engineer will also support efforts to establish our talent pipeline and work to improve our external reputation for technology excellence.

A technology evangelist both within Dunelm and the rest of the technology industry. You will work as both part of a self-organizing team and as an internal consultant, offering coaching, mentoring, and training to team members.

Ultimately, the Principal Engineer will lead the development of our Engineering capability to be best in class, defining and leading the strategy and approach for Engineering across Dunelm Technology.

What this role requires of you:

• Lead the delivery of the Focus Area goals
• Work closely with the Principal Product Manager and Principal Delivery to achieve Focus Area business goals
• Provide technical guidance and leadership to engineering teams, ensuring alignment with architectural standards, best practices, and outcome objectives
• Work closely with Principal Quality Specialists to develop and implement comprehensive quality assurance strategies, policies, and procedures
• Provide subject matter leadership and expertise for Architecture and Engineering including to third-party software providers where appropriate.
• Embed security, quality, and automation into our standard Engineering processes.
• Be the escalation point for all matters related to the Focus Area, teams and platform.
• Coach and mentor colleagues, fostering a culture of continuous learning, growth, and technical excellence
• Provide line management and oversee Tech leads, Staff Engineers and Early Career’s well-being, performance, and career development. 
• Collaborate recruitment efforts with the Software Engineering Manager and recruitment teams and attract and onboard top engineering talent
• Lead, drive and contribute to chapter development initiatives
• Collaborate with Staff Engineers and teams to stay abreast of emerging technologies, industry trends, and best practices; evaluate new tools and frameworks to drive innovation and efficiency
• Champion diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, promoting a culture of belonging and respect for all team members.  

Essential skills:

• Significant experience in Engineering practices, tools and their implementation in both Agile and waterfall environments
• Significant experience in modern Architecture
• Experience in Enterprise Architecture
• Experience in ERP integration
• Significant experience in Quality practices, tools and quality assurance processes
• Significant experience working within a hybrid engineering and SaaS environment 
• Understanding of modern technologies used within retail environments, especially the use of cloud technologies  
• Experience in line management of autonomous and highly skilled people.
• Experience in inspiring and motivating teams
• Experience in working with senior business stakeholders including providing appropriate challenges.
• A broad technology understanding with deep knowledge in specialist areas.
• Serverless technology and designing testable solutions
• Knowledge and experience of the following:
  • AWS
  • Microservices
  • Typescript
  • React
  • CI/CD practises and path to live

• Experience working within a multichannel retailer and/or manufacturer. 
• Experience in integrating headless SaaS packages with in-house built software
• Distributed Frontend
• Accessibility
• Isomorphic Architecture
• Caching and optimisation

Behaviours:

Customer First: You should prioritize the customer experience and continuously seek ways to improve it.

Strategic thinking: You should be able to think strategically and see the big picture, aligning technical decisions with business objectives and anticipating future technology trends.

Team Working: You should be a team player and effectively collaborate with colleagues to achieve common goals. You should be able to lead and inspire a team of engineers, creating a culture of collaboration, continuous improvement, and innovation.

Innovating: You should have a curious and explorative mindset, continuously seeking out new technologies and methodologies that can drive business growth and enhance products, services, and processes.

Make It Happen: You should take accountability for your work and actively identify technical challenges, developing and implementing solutions for teams in a timely and high-quality manner.