Principal Engineer

Job description

MOO brings brands to life in a sustainable way, with a range of remarkable print and merchandise products. We combine design, technology, manufacturing and service, so that people can connect in memorable ways. Not online but out there, in real life. We started in 2004. Since then we’ve built an award-winning and much-loved brand, with customer satisfaction and Trustpilot ratings that make most businesses want to give up and hire an army of review bots. We’ve got half a million customers, mostly small and medium businesses in North America, the UK, and Europe – businesses that, like us, get all excited about putting something real and beautiful into people’s hands. Does that make us nerds? Probably, and we’re ok with that. We’ve been given the highest business award in Britain, ‘The Queen’s Award for Enterprise’. Backed by venture capital, we’re part of Tech Nation’s ‘Future Fifty’, recently passing $1bn in lifetime revenue, and featuring in the Guardian’s top 10 UK start-ups list. Ok, we’ll stop bragging now. Today, we’re more than 400 people with our global HQ in London, UK, while we also have premises in Dagenham. In the US, you’ll find us in Boston, MA, as well as East Providence, RI and Denver, CO and with our most recent office expansion in Cape Town South Africa. MOO's engineering teams span the physical and digital worlds. Every order we take is manufactured after it is paid for, so the journey from "buy" to "delivered" runs through a factory as well as a database. That is true of the storefront, our design and customisation tools, cart, checkout and payments, business accounts, and equally true of order orchestration, manufacturing, fulfilment, shipping and the tooling our Customer Service and Operations teams use. The problems worth solving here run the length of that journey, and the hardest ones are usually the ones that cross it. As we scale, we're bringing together two ecommerce platforms while also experimenting with our customers' browsing experiences to support growth. On the other side of the order, we're consolidating tooling for Customer Service and Operations, improving data visibility across the order journey, integrating new carriers, and increasing manufacturing capacity while protecting customer experience and margin. We're also changing how we build, with AI-assisted development now part of everyday engineering practice here. You'll partner closely with engineering teams across our entire ecosystem, product leadership, and our Platform group, to deliver a coherent, scalable architecture and unblock cross-team delivery. Bring deep technical leadership across MOO's ecommerce ecosystem, from storefront and checkout through to delivered. You'll support in setting the architectural direction for that journey and enable multiple teams to move quickly and efficiently. Balance essential scaling of today's systems with an iterative migration away from legacy components. Define contracts, events and guardrails that make our ecosystem observable, resilient and cost-efficient. Set the standard for how we use AI-assisted development, so we get the speed without lowering the quality bar. Translate operational requirements from Operations and Customer Service, and commercial requirements from Product and Trading, into pragmatic platform improvements. You'll work with our engineering team, who are largely based in the UK, and with stakeholders at our manufacturing facilities in East Providence, Rhode Island and Dagenham, London. Senior IC role reporting into senior leadership (VP of Technology). Scope spans multiple teams across ecommerce and post-purchase, partnering closely with Product leadership and Platform and Architecture peers to help drive what the future of MOOs systems look like. **\*Travel to our East Providence facility a couple of times a year\* -** ( we are able open to findingalternatives with anyone for whom that travel is not workable) ### Responsibilities - **Domain leadership and technical strategy:** Work with other engineering leaders to define the architectural roadmap across the whole order journey, spanning storefront, design and customisation tooling, checkout and payments, order orchestration, manufacturing (IMFG, our manufacturing execution system, and our Tulip shop-floor apps), fulfilment, shipping and Customer Service tooling. - **Scale and reliability:** Lead cross-team initiatives that increase throughput and reduce cost-to-serve. Get us through peak trading without heroics, from traffic spikes at the front of the funnel through to production release at the back, and make sure we know in advance what would break first. Improve observability and operability across the flow from "buy" to "delivered", reducing "where is my order" contacts and manual interventions. - **AI-assisted development:** Set the standard for how engineers across your estate use AI tooling day to day. Work with Security, Legal and Platform to define guardrails on review, testing and security, decide where these tools genuinely help and where they do not, and raise the practice of the teams around you rather than only your own. - **Data and tooling coherence:** Assist in enabling a 360-degree order view and actioning capabilities for Customer Service and Operations by standardising data pipelines and surfacing the right aggregates in [our developer portal / Backstage] and related tools. - **Governance, facilitation and mentorship:** Mentor Staff and Senior Engineers across all of the engineering department. Facilitate design reviews, hackathons and workshops, resolve technical conflicts, and align stakeholders on pragmatic, high-impact solutions. ### About you *We do not expect one person to arrive with all of this. If you recognise yourself in most of it, we would like to hear from you.* - Proven track record shaping architecture and delivery for complex ecommerce estates at scale, ideally including some combination of storefront and checkout, order orchestration, manufacturing or fulfilment, shipping, returns, and Customer Service tooling. Real depth in one part of that journey and credible breadth across the rest. - Expert at designing service and event contracts, data flows and reliability patterns that enable multiple teams to ship safely and quickly. - You have taken systems through peak trading, or an equivalent step change in volume, and can tell us what broke and what you changed as a result. Written, drawn or talked through, whichever suits you. - A considered view on where AI-assisted development earns its place in professional engineering and where it does not, and an interest in how a team adopts it well rather than only how you use it yourself. - Able to align Operations, Customer Service, Product and Engineering, resolve technical disagreement, and translate architecture into measurable business impact. Used to working with teams in more than one time zone. - Able to balance migration with tactical scaling work in live systems. ### Nice To Have's - Experience with manufacturing execution systems, batching and scheduling algorithms, and warehouse or dispatch integrations. - Prior work migrating ecommerce platforms and improving Customer Service agent experience through unified data and the ability to act on it. - Experience of B2B or multi-tenant commerce, where an administrator buys on behalf of an organisation against controlled templates and budgets. - Hands-on experience introducing AI-assisted development across an engineering organisation, including the parts that went wrong. ### Outcomes you will drive - **Ecommerce performance and reliability:** storefront and checkout stay fast and available through peak, and teams can change conversion-critical paths without fear. - **Reliability and flow:** uptime and lead-time accuracy across the whole order journey, from checkout availability through to delivery. - **Peak readiness:** we trade without heroics throughout the year, and we know in advance what would break first. - **Faster and cheaper dispatch** through automated carrier integrations and improved lead-time logic. - **Higher manufacturing throughput** via robust batching, scheduling and performance improvements in IMFG and Tulip apps. - **Coherent architecture and data model across the order journey** that accelerates migration while stabilising today's operations. - **Faster delivery through AI-assisted development**, with no loss in the quality of what we ship.