Principal Developer (AI)

Location: Liverpool City Centre HQ, hybrid with 3 days in the office each week. Applicants must have at least one year remaining on a UK Graduate or Post-Study Work visa; visa sponsorship is not available.

Salary: Up to £100,000 per year, depending on experience.

Company

hirify.global is an established UK insurance business with over 40 years of specialist insurance experience, more than 1,700 employees and a new telemetry-driven product initiative.

What you will do

• Lead a mixed team of data engineers and backend developers building a new telemetry-driven platform from the ground up.
• Architect high-throughput ingestion and processing pipelines for streaming and batch telemetry data, including data models and hot, warm and cold storage strategies.
• Integrate telematics providers, normalise disparate formats, migrate legacy data stores and establish trusted data quality, lineage, observability and governance.
• Partner with data scientists to productionise models, build feature pipelines and create feedback loops between experimentation and live products.
• Build event-driven microservices with .NET and Azure, while defining clean integration points with Python-based data and machine-learning workloads.
• Set engineering standards, mentor the team and drive safe agentic development using AI coding agents, including guardrails for security, privacy, quality and maintainability.

Requirements

• Significant experience as a senior or principal engineer designing and delivering data-intensive systems and leading engineering teams.
• Experience building platforms handling large data volumes, ideally involving streaming, IoT, telemetry or time-series data.
• Strong .NET and Azure backend engineering skills, with solid knowledge of distributed systems and event-driven architecture.
• Deep data-engineering knowledge covering ingestion, pipelines, data modelling, partitioning, storage formats and performance tuning at scale.
• Experience working with data scientists to reliably move models and features into production.
• Hands-on experience using AI coding agents, with knowledge of context engineering, task decomposition, review and verification.
• Experience building products from scratch or in a startup, scale-up or new-venture environment, with pragmatic decision-making under ambiguity.
• Strong appreciation of data security, privacy and governance when handling sensitive customer data.
• Product focus, commercial awareness and excellent communication with technical and non-technical audiences.
• Curiosity, proactivity and an interest in experimenting with better ways to build, measure and deliver.

Nice to have

• Experience with telematics, connected vehicles or insurance data.
• Experience with multi-cloud data platforms, MLOps practices or Python used alongside data-science teams.

Culture & Benefits

• Build a new product line from a blank slate with ownership of its technical direction and influence over engineering standards and data strategy.
• Work in a small, autonomous, transparent team with data engineers, backend developers, data scientists and product professionals.
• Hybrid working from the Liverpool HQ, with a scale-up pace backed by an established business.
• Up to 35 days of holiday including bank holidays, with buy/sell options, flexible benefits and early salary access.
• 24/7 mental-health support, free counselling, professional development, conferences, leadership programmes and innovation time.
• Employment checks include a standard criminal-record check and an insolvency-register check before starting.

Hiring process

• Successful applicants undergo the stated employment checks before commencing employment.
• Adjustments can be requested during the recruitment process or employment.