Key Internal Relationships:

• The role will be expected to maintain relationships with a number of internal teams and colleagues.
• Digital Legal Delivery Leadership Team
• GenAI Leadership Team
• IT Leadership Team
• GC&R, Information Security & IT Security Team
• IT Architecture Team

Key External Relationships:

A number of key vendors provide products and services which combine to form key IT Digital services offered directly to the firm. The firm will embark upon relationships with additional vendors to augment the service we provide to our users.

This role requires good relationships with similar roles in other organisations - to ensure that our technical direction is reinforced by learnings from the widest possible landscape of solutions, industries and maturity levels.

It is expected that Principal Engineer will maintain relationships within the open source community, actively contributing to product development and online communities.

Key Responsibilities:

General

• Play a pivotal role in advancing the firms technology capability and business services. Recognised as the expert within HSF; brings extensive knowledge of the market and external issues to resolve problems.
• Understand requests, analyse needs and have strong knowledge of existing information systems, capabilities and limitations to deliver high quality technical solution architecture and design.
• Provide expert third line support for services. Resolve high complexity tickets and assist with escalations to vendors.
• Lead, champion, participate and constantly improve a comprehensive code change process which integrates with the wider organisational change processes.
• Contribute to cross-functional business processes and demonstrate an ability to provide value not only in one area of expertise, but more widely
• Lead our approach to disaster recovery (DR) for our digital services.
• Knowledgeable in platform and partner roadmaps to understand and appreciate product direction and opportunities to improve the service or offer new services.
• Participate in community forums to ensure the firm gets the most value from external user groups and good practice elsewhere. To drive adoption and maximise value from the technology, maintain an active position in the wider (external) communities and learn from experience others have with the platform.
• Act as a trusted SME to a large projects and initiatives to provide specialist advice and direction for new services. Lead research, design, development and implementation.
• Lead other team members, train and educate where necessary to ensure adequate coverage for technology expertise.
• Advise on project/programme and initiative steerco’s and sit on technology governance boards to offer expert guidance.
• Understand IT strategy and work to deliver the strategy under the guidance of the Head of Digital Product Engineering & System Integration.

Development/Coding

• Design and create solutions for business stakeholders including integration with other systems.
• Design and write high quality code that adheres to industry latest good practice and existing firm-wide security and architectural policy.
• Own & evolve the technical governance, design and delivery framework for bespoke service / app development, working with leaders from the architecture and IT security teams.
• Key Performance Indicators:
• Overall service uptime, availability and performance - improve service availability and general performance through proactive problem investigation, pre-emptive changes to the platform(s) and an innovative approach to resolution.
• Incident Resolution Time - create and lead initiatives designed to reduce the time between incidents being raised and resolved.
• Customer satisfaction - always customer focused; seek to understand how we can improve satisfaction with our productions and services.
• Solution delivery on time and to budget - provide regular updates on ETA, good communication and ensure that solutions are delivered with the right balance of quality and cost.
• Alignment to wider strategic business goals and initiatives - providing pivotal input to allow the organisation to extend into new marketplaces and further leverage existing channels.

Qualifications, skills and experience:

• Strong educational background, preferably educated to degree or similar level.
• Familiarity with ITIL practices, support models and corporate IT governance configuration - including financial and commercial aspects.
• Deep knowledge of, and preference for agile and lean working practices and principles - able to evangelise for and articulate benefit.
• CI/CD principles and technologies - version control, GIT, branching, PR, pipeline authoring, development and support - experience of one or more of: Azure DevOps, GitHub, BitBucket.
• Microservice principles and patterns and their use within a complex business critical environment.
• API principles and technologies - REST, SOAP, XML, JSON.
• Database technologies including relational, document and LLM vector (embedding) - SQL, MongoDB, etc.
• Strong familiarity with Microsoft Azure primary services (Amazon AWS and GCP beneficial).
• IaC - Terraform and Azure, AWS or GCP providers.
• HTML, CSS, PWA and other browser technologies.
• Chef, Puppet or Ansible.
• Use or containerisation technologies - Kubernetes, Docker or Podman in a cloud environment. Wide variety of language experience C, Javascript required, Python, PowerShell, PHP, M, DAX, SWIFT beneficial.
• Front-end framework/development experience - e.g. Vue, React, ASP.Net, Razor - to design and build multiplatform apps including MVC and other patterns.
• Working with Large Language Models, their API’s and operations - OpenAI, Vertex/Gemini and others.

Success Factors

Bringing my best

• Is a champion of culture for the department and in their engagement across the firm
• Brings vision and expertise to progress complex projects and manage broad ranging priorities
• Strategically influences stakeholders on issues of importance

Creating great results

• Leverages data, knowledge of the firm and deep relationships to influence stakeholders
• Leads team to deliver valuable support and commercial advice to stakeholders
• Effectively engages stakeholders across business services to leverage expertise and build shared ownership of change
• Supporting and developing others
• Aligns team capability and resourcing to deliver on department strategy and create value for the firm
• Keeps team feeling motivated and supported through challenging projects and work levels
• Makes a significant contribution to the development of team capability across the department

Enhancing the firm

• Plays a substantial role in shaping and implementing department strategy
• Delivers projects and initiatives that add value to the business and create sustainable change
• Looks to the future and considers how they can help the firm to adapt
• Effectively identifies and manages risk to ensure the best outcomes are realised