Principal Engineer

Job description

PRINCIPAL ENGINEER Hybrid - 3 days a week onsite Who We Are: At Omaze, we give our community in the UK and Germany the chance to win luxury homes and other life-changing prizes — all while raising money for the causes they love. Thanks to our Omaze Community, we’ve raised over £150 million for UK charities in just five years. That’s millions helping organisations like Age UK, the RSPCA, British Heart Foundation and Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity deliver life-saving work. And the best part? We’re only just getting started. Omaze is building a business and culture committed to growth and creating significant social impact on a global scale. 🔑 ABOUT THE JOB We're looking for a Principal Engineer to help drive innovation and shape the future of engineering at Omaze. This is a highly influential individual contributor role, working alongside our existing Principal Software Engineer to help advance technology across the organisation. You'll partner closely with the CTO, engineering and product teams to help define the long-term technical components and scaling of our platform and technology. As one of the most senior engineers in the business, you'll contribute to tackling our most complex technical challenges as well as technical investigations and prototyping new ideas and innovations. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys balancing pragmatic technical thinking with hands-on engineering, and who thrives on solving difficult problems that don't fit neatly into a sprint backlog. 🔧 WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING - Partner with Omaze's existing Principal Software Engineer to help drive innovation and new technologies. - Work closely with the CTO and Engineering Managers to investiagte key technology decisions. - Act as a technical advisor for complex initiatives, ensuring solutions are scalable, maintainable, secure and aligned with our long-term strategy. - Extend the engineering organisation's capacity for ad-hoc technical investigations, proof of concepts, rapid prototyping and strategic experiments. - Lead technical discovery for high-risk or high-ambiguity initiatives before they enter delivery. - Identify opportunities to reduce technical debt and improve platform reliability, performance and developer experience. - Champion modern mature software engineering practices, including automated testing, observability, CI/CD and cloud-native architecture. - Mentor senior engineers and technical leads, helping to raise the technical capability of the wider engineering team. - Showcase Omaze’s technical innovations internally and externally. - Facilitate technology reviews and encourage thoughtful technical discussions across teams. - Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend where they can create meaningful value for Omaze. - Foster a culture of curiosity, continuous learning and pragmatic decision-making. 🤩 ABOUT YOU You'll be an experienced software engineer who has operated at Staff or Principal level and enjoys solving organisation-wide technical challenges. You'll likely bring: - Significant experience designing and evolving large-scale systems and modern cloud-based applications. - Genuine curiosity with creative thinking around emerging technologies and AI-assisted engineering. - A proven track record of influencing technical strategy without relying on line management authority. - Ability to move freely between go-fast experimentation and system-wide integrity. - Excellent software engineering fundamentals and experience across backend systems, APIs and cloud infrastructure. - High performance mindset, able to balance scaling challenges against product need. - Strong architectural judgement with the ability to balance technical excellence against commercial priorities. - The ability to quickly understand unfamiliar systems, identify root causes and propose pragmatic solutions. - Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences. - A collaborative, humble approach and a genuine desire to help others succeed. 🙌 WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU - Generous stock options scheme - 25 days annual leave PLUS Bank Holidays - Private medical and dental insurance - 9% employer pension contributions, when you contribute at least 2% - A generous personal learning and development budget each year to use on training courses, conferences and professional memberships - Enhanced family leave policies - Life assurance of 4x your salary DEI Statement We actively seek out diversity of thought and experience to drive innovation. We welcome all backgrounds, identities, and perspectives and work hard to ensure that every Omaze employee can bring their authentic self to work at all times.