Principal Engineer - Architect - Hybrid

at  Catch

THE SKILLS YOU’LL HAVE

• 10+ years’ experience in technology roles – software engineering and architecture.
• 5+ years’ experience in technology leadership roles.
• Experience in retail, marketplace or ecommerce is highly desirable.
• Experience working in a dynamic agile environment.
• General breadth of domain knowledge in retail, marketplace, ecommerce.
• Ability to map business problems to technology capabilities and solutions.
• Ability to break down complex problems.
• Stakeholder and vendor management.
• Great communication skills, including an ability to explain technical concepts to cross-functional stakeholders.
• Great coaching and mentoring skills with pair and mob programming experience and a willingness to promote collaborative development techniques.
• Relationship builder that is comfortable to give and receive feedback regularly.
• Strong understanding of microservice and event driven architectures including effective API and event design, as well as fundamental design patterns such as hexagonal architecture. A good understanding of the practice of Domain Driven Design as it impacts large scale architecture, internal design, and cross-functional collaboration.
• Expertise in continuous delivery, including test automation strategies, automated infrastructure provisioning approaches, as well as progressive deployment and observability techniques. Experience with observability tooling, especially Datadog.
• Experience working in a DevOps culture, with a working knowledge of cloud providers (AWS preferred) and cloud native technologies such as Docker & Kubernetes, and experience tuning systems for high availability and performance.
• Polyglot programming skills, with deep expertise in at least one object-orientated or functional programming language, and an ability to learn new languages rapidly. A willingness to develop using Catch’s existing languages, primarily TypeScript and PHP.
• Full-stack development proficiency, guided by expert knowledge of concepts and practices such as SOLID, Clean Code and TDD, with comprehensive automated testing.
• Knowledge of code, data, and infrastructure security to support the practice of continuous security (DevSecOps).
• Outcome driven. A bias towards getting things done and avoiding handoffs.
• A team player seeking to achieve more together, grow together, make better decisions together and drive the continuous improvement of our business together.
• A growth mindset, willingness to wear different hats, and a strong desire to learn and apply new techniques and technologies to get the job done and refine their craft.
• Humility, pursuing and celebrating team success over individual achievement, and a commitment to helping others, valuing their contribution, and enabling their success.
• Thinkers and doers that are comfortable to offer ideas openly and speak their mind respectfully, with a bias to action and an experimentation mindset.
• Data driven, self-motivated, resilient, and curious.

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING

What does a normal day in the life of a Principal Engineer look like? Well, no 2 days are alike at Catch, but you could probably expect your day to include some of the following things:

• Lead architecture and engineering governance across P&T PED tribe, connecting teams to broadly aligned architecture practices and vision, engineering standards and technologies.
• Drive team alignment on architecture vision and solution decisions, collaborating and aligning with other technology and department leaders, and working with product leaders to decompose problem opportunities into incrementally deliverable pieces that incorporate movement to vision.
• Ensure teams adhere to architectural principles and engineering standards, leading their definition and refinement.
• Champion technical excellence through practices such as domain driven design, test automation, and API first development.
• Support teams in identifying, assessing, and implementing new technology platforms to enable and simplify delivery.
• Regularly implement solutions hands-on with engineers, driving the realisation of engineering standards and reinforcing the practice of DevSecDataOps.
• Ensure effective utilisation of the existing technology platforms.
• Ensure adherence to SLOs across in-house and vendor technologies.
• Apply engineering practices such as continuous delivery and infrastructure as code to support a sustainable agile delivery process.
• Inform improvements to processes and systems by monitoring measures of their effectiveness and efficiency.
• Assist teams in managing their systems technical health, prioritising a technology backlog and advocating for action.
• Contribute to overall product and technology asset lifecycle for application, integration, infrastructure, data, operational
• Apply a commercial mindset within the engineering and architecture community, especially to solution architecture and vision decision making.
• Build relationships with technology partners, within PT and across departments.
• Assess, monitor, and take actions for vendor supported/owned platform health technology through collaboration with others.
• Drive a teach and learn culture, nurture constant skills and people growth.
• Provide regular leadership, mentoring and coaching to all team members.
• Foster a culture of innovation, learning, and continuous improvement.
• Serve as a thought leader and trusted technology advisor to teams and stakeholders.

The Principal Engineer role sits within Product, Engineering, and Delivery (PED), which includes the following domains:

• Shopping and customer experience: enabling customer acquisition, conversion, and retention.
• Trade: enabling our retail, marketplace, and eCommerce business operations.
• Customer service: enabling our customer support team, and customer self-service.
• Fulfilment: enabling our supply chain and warehouse operations, particularly through vendor integrations