Software Engineering Principal

Why Consumer/Digital?

Unprecedented scale and opportunity
Consumer is the largest telco in the industry. With over 20k employees and 34 million customers, we generate over £10bn in revenue. This offers enormous opportunities for our people and to be No. 1 in the market.  Our Consumer Unit exists as three household brands - BT, EE & Plusnet from which collectively we generate more revenue than any other part of BT. Our brilliant brands are all beautiful individually. Each has unique attributes that cater to very different segments of the market. This makes our goal possible; to create a connection in every home in the UK by 2025.

Our Digital unit is responsible for leading BT’s digital transformation, delivering brilliant customer experiences and creating the innovative products and services our customers need.

BT’s future will be defined by our ability to rapidly bring compelling, innovative ideas to market, partnering with our customers and suppliers to deliver innovative, adaptable solutions, delivered over best-in-class digital platforms.

Digital’s role is to drive all elements of that equation, from digital innovation through platform delivery and product development, and to do so with absolute focus on our customers. Whether it’s creating services like connected care solutions that help you track your loved ones’ wellbeing, or security apps that guard against cyber-attacks, Digital is about leading BT’s digital transformation, driving service innovation and delivering the products and services our customers need to support their own goals fast, and at scale.
When we say you’re welcome here at BT, in line with our manifesto of being sustainable, responsible, and inclusive we really mean it. We want our teams to fully represent the communities and customers we serve. 

We’re open and understanding, so if you need us to make some adjustments to the interview process, let us know. We encourage and celebrate working flexibly, whether that means working certain hours to help with your lifestyle. Talk to us and let’s see what we can do.

Why this job matters

The purpose of the Principal software engineering role is to develop solutions to highly complex problems. When working with other Principal Software Engineers, this role will have a wider area of impact and will cross multiple domains, products, teams, and/or systems, with a primary focus within a unit. Keeping up to date with current thinking in the industry and sharing back knowledge effectively with the Software Engineering and BT at large. Maintaining a high degree of trust and reputation with external parties.

Working in this job, you’ll be a critical part of delivering BT’s Digital transformation.  You’ll be engineering the next generation of technology to support BTs new IT architecture.  Founded on agile engineering, DevOps and cloud native principles.

What I’ll be doing – your accountabilities

•    Technical software engineering lead across Advisor Hub components.  Sets strategy and how the components are engineered and deployed.  Works with the software developers to transform our devops approaches.  Expert in software engineering, monitoring, tuning and scaling.  Deep knowledge of the application estate and traffic flows. 
•    Deep knowledge of stack operation and technical design across the software stacks and processes.
•    Adherence to architecture strategy and patterns.
•    Devops leadership and rollout
•    Provides key operational insights and proactive actions underpinning health of our software applications
•    Joined up approach to cross stack correlation and monitoring 
•    Drive software engineering excellence and the modernisation of engineering practice. 
•    Identify industry trends and new engineering approaches/technolgoies, lead on related Proof of Concept work and provide recommendations on when to scale further or to wind down
•    Review of software solutions to ensure correct level of monitoring, reporting, logging has been added at code authoring stage to ensure an effective operational maintenance and reporting solution is achieved 
•    Applies specialist expertise to deliver technical work that is typically unique, complex, and high impact across multiple domains and/or requiring both breadth and depth of domain knowledge.
•    Serves as technical expert and consultant to resolve complex and strategic issues, across wider industry and/or specific sectors, and develop bespoke or leading edge, technically complex solutions (e.g., relating to new, un-tested technology and/or large scale impact of products).
•    Provides direction and strategy to define product roadmaps within domain of expertise in a highly ambiguous, complex and multi-vendor technical environment.
•    Shares knowledge and thought leadership to advance team’s thinking, guide technical decisions and provide strategic level recommendations on high profile customer solutions.
•    Resolve difficult or complex issues, including problems that require both breadth and depth of domain knowledge;                                                                                                         stakeholder engagement e.g Business, operations, suppliers and employees.
•    Assure and improve the impact of software design & development decisions on the customer experience.     
•    Facilitate post implementation reviews and continuous improvement activity.

Skills required for the job

•    Cloud software design and engineering: strong skills in architecting cloud native software and integration of SaaS and on-premises software solutions.  Ability to set our generic standards and patterns, with clean documentation and guidance for large development teams.   Strong understanding of document based databases; when to use and how to scale.
•    Architecture and solutions design: skills in complex architecture definition and solutions design involving multiple components across architectural domains are a must. Knowledge of domain-driven principles and ability to decompose into well defined functional domains  
•    Agile: previous experience and skills working in an Agile team; appreciation and skills running Agile Ceremonies; knowledge of SCRUM methodologies.
•    Agile software engineering: strong skills and experience building software in an agile team; track record implementing DevOps, microservice and cloud engineering patterns and techniques.
•    Be tech savvy: Provides comprehensive technical expertise on emerging technologies. Coordinates technology knowledge sharing with the team.
•    Testing concepts: Highly knowledgeable about a wide range of testing issues, within the context of software development practice, and able to advise and guide others. Familiar with modern testing approaches e.g. consumer-driven contract testing
•    Give specialised advice: Provides guidance and counsel on complex and unfamiliar situations and leverages other  experts to develop solution plans
•    Hold others to account: Demands high ethical  standards and values led behaviours ensuring  the same understanding in their team. Calls out misaligned or poor behaviours
•    Creating maintainable code: The application of practices and tools that help to create code that is easy to understand, easy to modify, easy to test and works correctly – ‘clean code’
•    API Engineering – oversee development of cloud-native APIs to support our digital transformation, primarily supporting (but not limited to) our web and mobile applications exposed via APIGEEE

Experience you would be expected to have

•    Highly experienced software engineer familiar with telco stacks and technologies used within covering cots and home grown applications
•    Agile experience 
•    5-10 years experience in software engineering and architecture,