Principal Developer | up to £70k | Hybrid, Stockport

Principal Developer up to 70k Hybrid, Stockport

Pearson Carter are currently working with a fast-growing organisation operating across e-commerce, digital platforms and healthcare, who are looking to appoint a Principal Developer to take ownership of key technical initiatives across the wider business.

This is a senior, hands-on position offering plenty of variety, with responsibility spanning cloud infrastructure, security, software architecture and emerging AI technologies. You'll work closely with senior stakeholders and engineering teams, helping shape technical direction while getting involved in complex challenges across multiple platforms.

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Responsibilities:

• Take ownership of group-wide infrastructure, cloud governance, DNS management and security.
• Lead security improvement programmes, ensuring audit findings are addressed and appropriate controls are implemented.
• Oversee cloud environments across GCP and AWS, including access management, security posture and cost optimisation.
• Manage infrastructure migrations, legacy server decommissioning and ongoing platform improvements.
• Provide technical oversight across multiple platforms, including WordPress environments, databases and payment gateway integrations.
• Review software architecture and API designs, ensuring solutions are secure, scalable and maintainable.
• Support DevOps activities, including CI/CD pipelines, deployment processes and environment management.
• Contribute to AI automation initiatives, including LLM integrations, RAG systems and MCP-based solutions.
• Establish engineering standards, improve development workflows and promote consistent code quality.
• Act as a senior technical point of contact, supporting and mentoring developers across engineering teams.

Experience:

• 8 years of professional software development experience, with strong backend and systems-level knowledge.
• Experience working across PHP/WordPress and modern JavaScript or TypeScript environments.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, ideally across GCP and AWS.
• Experience with infrastructure management, server migrations and infrastructure-as-code approaches.
• A solid understanding of security architecture, including authentication, authorisation, DNS and endpoint management.
• Experience with payment gateway integrations, webhooks and secure payment processing.
• Strong knowledge of REST API design, integration and architecture.
• Experience with database optimisation and diagnosing performance issues across live platforms.
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development, LLMs, RAG systems and automation tools.
• Comfortable working autonomously, managing competing priorities and taking ownership of complex technical challenges.

Desirable Experience:

• Experience within healthcare, fintech or another regulated environment.
• Practical understanding of GDPR and secure data handling.
• Experience with MCP servers and organisational AI tooling.
• Experience mentoring developers or helping establish engineering standards.

Salary:

• Competitive salary, dependent on experience.
• Potential equity opportunity for the right candidate.

Location:

• Hybrid working one day per week in the Stockport office (Thursday), with the remainder remote.

Benefits:

• Company pension scheme.
• Private health insurance.
• Staff discounts across the company's product range.
• Access to Claude Enterprise and AI-assisted development tools.
• Opportunity to influence technical strategy and help build a growing engineering function.

How to Apply:

If you are interested in this opportunity, please send your CV to Cameron.s@pearsoncarter.com or call 0191 406 6111.

Pearson Carter is the Global Leader in IT Recruitment with specialist roles across the globe.