Principal Engineer

Job Description

Join us, be part of more.

We’re so much more than an energy company. We’re a family of brands revolutionising how we power the planet. We're energisers. One team of 21,000 colleagues that's energising a greener, fairer future by creating an energy system that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels, whilst living our powerful commitment to igniting positive change in our communities. Here, you can find more purpose, more passion, and more potential. That’s why working here is #MoreThanACareer. We do energy differently - we do it all. We make it, store it, move it, sell it, and mend it.

Centrica, Technology is a core driver of how we deliver our strategy. You’ll join a team modernising our platforms, strengthening cyber and operational resilience, and advancing a product‑led way of working that brings engineers, data specialists and business experts together to deliver meaningful outcomes at pace.

We’re scaling automation and AI from proof‑of‑concept into real, end‑to‑end change - improving customer journeys, reducing cost‑to‑serve, accelerating delivery, and building the digital foundations that underpin everything from energy trading and risk to field operations and critical infrastructure.

If you want to work on complex, high‑impact problems using modern engineering practices, and help build reusable platforms that will shape how Centrica operates over the next decade, this is the place to do it.

An opportunity to play your part - The Principal Software Engineer provides the technical leadership, architectural vision, and engineering standards required to evolve and scale the Field Mobile Platform. The role ensures that our mobile applications deliver a unified, performant, secure and resilient experience that enables thousands of field colleagues to work efficiently, safely and effectively every day.

The role is expected to use automation, data and AI enabled tooling to reduce repetitive work, improve code quality, speed up development cycles and strengthen reliability—while retaining full human accountability for technical judgement and decisions.

Location: UK-based hybrid role, Occasional travel to site.

Day to day:

1. Define & evolve the Field Mobile Platform architecture Set the long term architecture, patterns, and guardrails for mobile apps, APIs, integration layers, and platform services to ensure scalability, resilience, interoperability and a unified experience.

2. Drive consolidation and simplification of the mobile estate Lead the rationalisation of legacy mobile apps into a coherent platform, reducing duplication, technical debt, maintenance costs, and operational complexity.

3. Shape cross domain technical design decisions Partner across Product, Architecture, Supply Chain, Scheduling, and Field Operations to drive consistent data models, integration patterns, UX principles and mobile standards across all field workflows.

4. Identify and deliver new digital capabilities Work with product and business leaders to define new mobile capabilities (e.g., supply chain, quoting, workflow optimisation, knowledge management) to enhance safety, compliance, customer experience and productivity.

5. Establish engineering excellence across teams Champion high engineering standards: clean architecture, CI/CD automation, observability, testing strategies, release processes, telemetry, performance tuning and secure-by-design principles.

6. Lead platform performance, reliability & offline capability Ensure the mobile environment performs reliably in challenging field conditions (poor signal, offline mode), with focus on failover behaviours, caching, performance profiling and user trust.

7. Influence and steward Security, SRE, Quality and Platform wide capabilities Shape quality, resilience, and security strategies across teams—ensuring teams adopt shift left testing, strong security hygiene, consistent observability, and reliable operational processes.

8. Improve how work is done (template requirement) Continuously identify opportunities to automate, simplify, reduce cycle time, improve developer experience, adopt new tools/AI, and scale better engineering practices across squads.

Here's who we're looking for:

Technical Skills

• Technical leadership and architectural vision to evolve and scale mobile platform, Significant experience as a senior/principal software engineer in complex digital platforms. Experience working across multiple teams and influencing without line management

• Define mobile platform architecture/guardrails; drive engineering excellence (CI/CD, observability, testing); ensure performance, reliability and offline capability Deep expertise in modern engineering practices (APIs, microservices, CI/CD, observability). Proven ability to define and influence technical standards and architectural direction. Strong problem solving skills in ambiguous, high impact technical environments

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent experience

Nature of Thinking Required: Resolves complex, cross domain technical challenges involving mobile, backend APIs, orchestration layers, and field operational workflows. Balances near term delivery pressure against long term architectural sustainability. Solves ambiguous problems with incomplete data, designing scalable patterns that support multiple business domains.

Decisions: Owned: Mobile platform architecture, coding standards, integration patterns, security baseline, technology choices, performance strategies. Acceptance of technical designs, readiness for release, critical code reviews.

Decisions: Influenced: Product roadmap priorities, UX direction, cross team delivery sequencing, partner tool selection, funding for technical investments.

Use of Insight, Data & Automation: Uses telemetry, profiling tools, error tracking, synthetic monitoring and AI assisted diagnostics to drive decisions. Validates but does not blindly trust automated or AI generated insights; human in the loop accountability remains primary.

Constraints & Frameworks: Centrica architectural frameworks, security and data privacy standards, mobile platform patterns, operational governance.

Core Competencies & Technical Skills (AI and emerging technology):

Designs, integrates and operates AI-enabled solutions within enterprise environments, including prompt-driven workflows, retrieval-augmented systems and AI agents.

Applies structured evaluation, testing and monitoring practices to ensure AI outputs are reliable, secure and compliant with organisational guardrails.

Prepares and manages data used in AI workflows and takes responsibility for the responsible lifecycle of AI features from experimentation through deployment and continuous improvement.

Core Behaviours:

• Take Ownership

• Work as One Team

• Develop a Growth Mindset

• Strive to Innovate

• Champion Customers

AI / Digital fluency skills:

• Ability to design, integrate and operate AI‑enabled solutions within enterprise environments, including prompt‑driven workflows, retrieval‑augmented systems and AI agents. Applying structured evaluation, testing and monitoring practices to ensure AI outputs are reliable, secure and compliant with organisational guardrails.

• Prepares and manages data used in AI workflows and take responsibility for the responsible lifecycle of AI features from experimentation through to deployment and continuous improvement.

Why should you apply?

We’re not a perfect place – but we’re a people place. Our priority is supporting all of the different realities our people face. Life is about so much more than work. We get it. That’s why we’ve designed our total rewards to give you the flexibility to choose what you need, when you need it, making sure that you and your family are supported not only financially, but physically and emotionally too. Visit the link below to discover why we’re a great place to work and what being part of more means for you.

https://www.morethanacareer.energy/centrica

If you're full of energy, fired up about sustainability, and ready to craft not only a better tomorrow, but a better you, then come and find your purpose in a team where your voice matters, your growth is non-negotiable, and your ambitions are our priority.

Help us, help you. We would love for you to share any information about yourself throughout our recruitment process so that we can better understand you and help shape your journey.