Principal Engineer

Principal Engineer (Manchester - Hybrid)

About Finova 

Finova is the UK’s largest mortgage and savings technology provider, powering one in every five mortgages across the country. Our agile, cloud-native solutions help over 60 banks, building societies, specialist lenders and equity release providers — plus a network of 2,400+ brokers — stay ahead of the market. 

We offer a flexible, proven suite of software that covers the full customer journey — from mortgage and savings origination to servicing and CRM. Backed by an open architecture and a team with deep industry expertise, our platform is built to scale. Today, we process over £50 billion in loans each year, manage nearly £50 billion in savings, and support the digital servicing of more than 650,000 UK borrower accounts. 

For Lenders 

Finova offers a flexible, modular technology suite designed to help lenders move faster, scale efficiently, and deliver standout digital experiences. You can run your entire mortgage and savings business on Finova — or just use the modules you need, tailored by our team or configured in-house through our low-code platform. 

Our solutions include: 

• Lending – end-to-end mortgage and specialist lending software built for speed, flexibility, and scale. 

• Decisioning – powerful tools for smarter, more personalised lending decisions. 

• Servicing – intuitive workflows and automation to simplify day-to-day account management and customer servicing. 

• Savings – configurable onboarding and customer engagement tools across all savings products. 

• Intermediary Manager – broker relationship and compliance management, powered by real-time external data. 

• Broker ID – fast, automated broker verification and compliance tracking using KYB, KYC, and live monitoring from public data sources. 

Lenders use Finova to launch products faster, process applications up to 50% more efficiently, and reduce operational costs — all while staying fully compliant in a fast-moving market.

About the Role:

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer who thrives in a fast-moving, cloud-first environment and enjoys solving complex technical challenges that span teams and systems.
As a Principal Engineer, you’ll act as a technical leader and architect, shaping how we design, build, and scale our core platforms. You’ll partner with engineering, product, and delivery leads to define technical direction, improve engineering practices, and mentor others to deliver high-quality, maintainable software at speed.

You’ll help evolve our systems from legacy and on-premise origins to next-generation, cloud-native architectures - ensuring we deliver resilient, performant, and future-proof solutions for our customers.

What will you be doing?

• Architect and evolve our complex B2B workflow platform, ensuring scalability, reliability, and security across multiple products and teams.

• Lead cross-team technical initiatives, defining best practices for API design, cloud architecture, and DevOps automation.

• Partner with product and delivery leadership to shape technical roadmaps and align engineering priorities with business goals.

• Drive architectural consistency across services and codebases, setting the patterns that others follow.

• Coach and mentor engineers and technical leads, growing technical capability and fostering a culture of excellence.

• Champion automation, observability, and continuous delivery — ensuring everything we build is testable, measurable, and maintainable.

• Anticipate and address systemic challenges, from scalability bottlenecks to developer experience gaps.

• Evaluate emerging technologies and AI tooling to improve developer productivity and system efficiency.

• Measure and improve engineering performance, influencing DORA metrics and operational maturity across teams.
• Flexible working required, must have the ability to work out of hours occasionally; on call work is sometimes required.

About You:

• You’re a hands-on technical leader who balances strategic thinking with practical delivery.
• Expert in TypeScript / JavaScript with strong experience in containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Knowledge of at least one high performance language such as GoLang

• Skilled in designing and evolving distributed, cloud-native systems (experience with Azure, AWS, or GCP is a plus).
• Strong understanding of software architecture principles, API-first design, event-driven and microservices patterns.

• Deep appreciation for automation, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code.

• You naturally influence without authority, building alignment across teams through clarity, empathy, and technical credibility.

• Passionate about mentoring and knowledge sharing — you raise the bar for those around you.

• You’re pragmatic and outcome-driven, always balancing technical purity with business value.

• You believe in “we build it, we run it” — every system you design is operable and observable from day one.

• Curious about how AI and emerging tools can amplify developer and product outcomes.

What We Offer:

Flexible Working: 25 days holiday plus bank holidays, bank holiday trading and holiday purchase options, the opportunity to work from anywhere in the world for up to 4 weeks per year, and a flexible hybrid working policy. 

Looking After You: Life Assurance, Group Income Protection, Private Medical Insurance, a pension scheme via Salary Exchange, an Employee Assistance Programme, and access to a Virtual GP.

Family-Friendly Policies: Enhanced maternity and paternity pay, as well as paid time off for fertility treatments and pregnancy loss. 

Extra Perks: Cycle to Work Scheme, discounts on shops, restaurants, and gym memberships, free fresh fruit daily, and opportunities to join colleague networks and social groups. 

Giving Back: One paid volunteering day annually and the Give-As-You-Earn scheme to support your favourite charities. 

Equal Opportunity Statement 

We value diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. If you’re passionate about this role but don’t meet all the criteria, please reach out—we’d love to discuss how your skills and experiences align with our needs.