Join us as a Principal Engineer
- This is a high-impact position where you’ll design and engineer modern, resilient, and cloud-ready platforms, with customer and user experience at the heart of every solution
- You’ll play a key role in our Engineering Centre of Excellence, elevating engineering standards, guiding strategic technology transformation, and enabling high-performing engineering teams
- This role offers significant senior-level stakeholder exposure, broad architectural responsibilities, and the opportunity to influence and shape the bank’s next generation technology landscapes
- We're offering this role at vice president level
As a Principal Engineer, you’ll architect and deliver innovative engineering solutions for complex business problems, ensuring our platforms are secure, scalable, cloud-native, and aligned with enterprise technology strategy. You’ll drive the development of software and tools to accomplish project and departmental objectives by converting functional and non-functional requirements into suitable designs. By leading the planning, specification, development, and deployment of high-performance, robust, and resilient systems, you’ll ensure they follow excellent architectural and engineering principles and are fit for purpose. As well as managing the technical delivery of one or more software engineering teams, you’ll lead wider participation in internal and industry-wide events, conferences, and other activities.
Moreover, you’ll define, govern, and optimise end-to-end engineering designs, with a strong focus on automation, resilience, performance, observability, developer experience, and operational excellence. You’ll oversee the productivity of software engineering teams and be responsible for the consistent use of shared platform components and technologies. Leading engagements with senior stakeholders, you’ll also explore and propose appropriate technical solutions to achieve the required product features.
Other responsibilities will include:
- Leading the architecture and design of microservices, event-driven systems, BPMN workflows, and distributed platforms, ensuring scalability and resilience
- Defining and maintaining architectural roadmaps, engineering standards, reusable components, and reference implementations
- Driving legacy modernisation by transforming monoliths into cloud-native solutions and leading migration across IaaS, PaaS, and CaaS
- Providing end-to-end technical governance across design, development, testing, security, performance, and release management, ensuring compliance
- Partnering with product, architecture, and engineering leaders to deliver high-quality, high-performance solutions and measurable business value
- Championing engineering excellence through automation, including unit and integration testing, performance tuning, observability, and production troubleshooting
- Mentoring and leading engineers while tracking delivery progress, improving capability, and ensuring platforms meet functionality, scalability, and reliability goals
To succeed in this role, you’ll need to bring significant experience in software engineering, solution architecture, and modern cloud-native development, with a proven track record of delivering complex enterprise applications end-to-end. Alongside strong hands-on technical depth, you’ll also have to demonstrate strong leadership capability in guiding engineering teams through architecture definition, execution, and operationalisation.
In addition, you’ll need:
- Deep expertise of at least 12 years in Java, Spring Boot, microservices architecture, and building scalable, cloud native applications across AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, PaaS, and CaaS platforms
- Strong experience in Camunda BPMN, event-driven systems, APIs such as REST and SOAP, IAM technologies including Ping, TYK, and JWKS, and enterprise integration patterns
- Solid data engineering capability across SQL and NoSQL technologies such as Oracle, Postgres, MongoDB, and DB2, including schema design, optimisation, migrations, and high-volume processing
- Proven technical architecture leadership across large-scale enterprise programs, including cloud migration, legacy transformation, and distributed system design
- Expertise in DevOps and engineering excellence, including CI/CD pipelines, automated testing such as TDD and Mockito, code quality tools, release management, and production readiness
- A strong focus on non-functional excellence, including performance optimisation, security, accessibility, observability, and monitoring tools such as Splunk and APM
- Strong leadership, communication, and Financial Crime expertise such as SAR, case management, and workflows, able to mentor teams, influence stakeholders, and drive governance and best practices
Hours
45Job Posting Closing Date:
18/06/2026Skills Required
- Significant experience in software engineering, solution architecture, and cloud-native development
- At least 12 years of experience in Java, Spring Boot, and microservices architecture
- Experience in AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, PaaS, and CaaS platforms
- Deep expertise in Camunda BPMN, APIs, and enterprise integration patterns
- Solid data engineering capability across SQL and NoSQL technologies
- Proven experience in DevOps and automated testing
- Strong leadership and communication skills
NatWest Group Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about NatWest Group and has not been reviewed or approved by NatWest Group.
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Flexible Benefits — A flexible ValueAccount structure with pension and benefit funding allows tailoring of health, protection, lifestyle, and savings options, with unused amounts typically paid as cash. This flexibility supports personalisation of coverage, particularly in Great Britain where the framework is most detailed.
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Retirement Support — Employer-funded pension contributions are provided on top of salary in Great Britain, alongside automatic retirement enrollment and share/save programs. This creates structured long‑term wealth support as part of total reward.
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Parental & Family Support — UK policies outline extended maternity, adoption and equal partner leave on full pay with a phased return, plus paid neonatal care leave. These provisions are positioned as market‑leading and complement broader flexibility resources.
NatWest Group Insights
What We Do
We’re a business that understands when our customers and people succeed, our communities succeed, and our economy thrives. As part of our purpose, we’re looking at how we can drive change for our communities in enterprise, learning and climate. As one of the leading supporters of UK business, we’re prioritising enterprise as a force of change. We’re focusing on the people and communities who have traditionally faced the highest barriers to entry and figuring out ways to remove these. Learning is also key to our continued growth as a company in an ever changing and increasingly digital world. By setting a dynamic and leading learning culture, our people prosper, and our customers are given the tools to continue to improve their financial capability and confidence. One of the biggest challenges we all face in our future is climate change. That’s why we’ve put it right at the core of our purpose. We want to champion climate solutions with financing and entrepreneurial support, fully embed climate into our culture and decision making, and be climate positive by 2025. We’re committed to using our purpose to break down barriers, drive change and ultimately create a great place to work.
