About this role
Salary: £? - ? per year
Requirements
- Extensive experience as a Principal Engineering Lead, Engineering Practice Lead, Technical Authority, or equivalent senior technical leader.
- Proven experience leading AI transformation in software engineering, including implementing and adopting AI-assisted and agentic development practices, governance, and measurable outcomes.
- Strong hands-on engineering capability, with the credibility to investigate complex problems, challenge designs, guide implementation, and support engineering teams directly.
- Extensive retail and e-commerce experience, ideally in a large-scale, complex, or omnichannel organisation.
- Strong SAP Commerce Cloud / SAP Hybris experience and understanding of enterprise commerce platforms, integrations, and storefront architectures.
- Broad engineering expertise across backend services, web storefronts, mobile platforms, and cloud-based technologies.
- Strong knowledge of modern SDLC practices, Agile, DevOps, SRE, DevSecOps, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and automated testing.
- Experience implementing secure engineering controls, including SAST, SCA, SBOM, and OWASP principles, alongside observability and DORA metrics.
- Excellent technical leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills, with the confidence to influence multiple teams without direct line authority.
Responsibilities
- Define and embed engineering standards and best practices across multiple technology teams.
- Lead AI transformation in software engineering, driving adoption of AI-assisted and agentic development practices across the SDLC.
- Establish appropriate AI tooling, including tools such as GitHub Copilot, and set responsible-use guardrails, governance, and measurable adoption outcomes.
- Provide senior technical leadership, challenge architectural decisions, and take a hands-on approach to resolving complex engineering issues.
- Apply SAP Commerce Cloud / Hybris and e-commerce domain knowledge to influence technical decisions and improve platform engineering practices.
- Champion CI/CD, automated testing, TDD/BDD, secure-by-design development, and frequent, incremental releases.
- Partner with Architecture to align engineering practices with technical strategy and architectural guardrails.
- Improve engineering effectiveness through DORA metrics, observability, and measurable improvements in software delivery.
- Coach Capability Leads, Technical Leads, and engineers, supporting adoption, knowledge sharing, and sustainable improvements across internal and third-party teams.
- Raise engineering standards across SAP, DevOps, Domain Services, Storefront, iOS, and Android teams.
- Act as the senior technical escalation point, unblocking teams, influencing technical direction, and resolving complex technical challenges.
- Lead the move toward agentic development practices in which AI agents plan, build, test, and review changes under appropriate human oversight, and measure impacts on quality, security, productivity, and delivery.
Technologies
- AI
- AI Agents
- Android
- Backend
- CI/CD
- Cloud
- Copilot
- DevSecOps
- DevOps
- GitHub
- Support
- Mobile
- OWASP
- SAP
- SAP Commerce
- Security
- TDD
- Web
- iOS
- Agentic AI
- C#
- React
- microservices
More
We are seeking a Principal Engineering Practice Lead / Technical Authority for a large-scale e-commerce business undergoing platform modernisation and AI transformation. This is a six-month rolling contract with strong potential for extension, based in London with a hybrid arrangement requiring two days per week onsite. Working closely with senior engineering and Architecture stakeholders, you will help shape how the organisation develops and delivers software, drive engineering innovation, and improve engineering capability, security, and delivery performance.
last updated 44 week of 2026