Consulting/Principal Software Engineer (Distributed Systems)

TL;DR

Consulting/Principal Software Engineer (Distributed Systems): Leading technical direction and hands-on development for the SciVal product, building scalable, reliable, and data-driven solutions with an accent on architectural design, quality strategy, and continuous improvement. Focus on decomposing epics into stories, defining CI/CD pipelines, driving pragmatic quality strategies, and mentoring the cross-functional squad.

Location: London, UK. Flexible working hours with home, office, or commuting allowance.

Company

hirify.global is a global leader in information and analytics, providing data-driven products for researchers and healthcare professionals to advance science and improve health outcomes.

What you will do

• Serve as the first line of technical escalation and facilitate team ceremonies.
• Translate product objectives into sound technical designs and acceptance criteria; decompose epics.
• Design and implement complex features, complete complex bug fixes and performance improvements.
• Define and uphold the Definition of Ready/Done, including code quality, automated test coverage, security checks, and observability.
• Establish/maintain CI/CD pipelines, quality gates, and sensible branching/release strategies.
• Partner with TIO on SLOs, alerting, runbooks, incident response, and post-incident learning.
• Mentor through pairing, code/test reviews, and architecture discussions.

Requirements

• Around 7+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Quality Engineering, or related roles, contributing to complex systems in production.
• Experience leading through influence, such as technical leadership, feature ownership, or community/guild participation.
• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Demonstrated depth in at least one technical domain, such as distributed systems, data platforms, or high-scale web or mobile applications.
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages or stacks, such as Java/JVM, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#/.NET, Python, C/C++, or SQL.
• Experience working in Linux or Windows environments.
• Familiarity with relational and non-relational databases, including data modelling and performance tuning.
• Experience or familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, containerised environments, cloud fundamentals, and observability tools.
• Working knowledge of secure coding practices, performance analysis, reliability concepts, and participation in incident response.

Culture & Benefits

• Promote a healthy work/life balance across the organisation with flexible working hours.
• Comprehensive Pension Plan and generous vacation entitlement, including option for sabbatical leave.
• Maternity, Paternity, Adoption and Family Care leave.
• Personal Choice budget, various employee discounts, and recruitment introduction reward.
• Internal communities and networks, and an Employee Assistance Program (global).