Principal Engineer

CreateFuture is a UK digital consultancy with offices in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester and London, and remote employees throughout the country. We collaborate with major organisations to build digital products and services, and we pride ourselves on a safe, supportive and friendly culture.

We are a team of creators—from code and project plans to go-to-market strategies, culture initiatives, marketing campaigns, large language models or people policies. We have worked with clients across multiple industries, including PayPal, Adidas, NatWest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert.

Our reputation as a partner that delivers high-quality, robust and thoughtful products has enabled us to scale to over 500 people in the last couple of years, and our amazing people are key to our success. We have been recognised by Best Workplaces UK across multiple categories, and our employee exit rate is low.

Join us on our journey… Let’s create something awesome, together, today.

About the role

As a Principal Engineer at CreateFuture, you’ll play a key role in leading both client and internal projects to successful outcomes. You’ll build strong relationships with stakeholders, provide strategic technical direction, and embed best software engineering practices across our build teams. Your expertise will help shape not just individual projects, but the broader engineering capability within our organisation.

What you’ll be doing

• Technical Strategy & Leadership: Define and drive technical strategies, setting high standards for architecture, security, and quality across all engineering initiatives.
• Project & Engineering Leadership: Lead engineering across client projects from inception to delivery. Help support RFPs and new bids with the Commercial team to ensure technical feasibility and excellence.
• Consulting & Business Development: Use commercial awareness and a growth mindset to spot new opportunities and work with commercial teams to expand impact and revenue.
• Capability Building & Mentorship: Act as a subject matter expert, mentoring engineers and ensuring our technical capabilities evolve with client needs and industry trends.
• Pre-Sales & Client Engagement: Shape and lead the technical aspects of pre-sales conversations. Represent CreateFuture through events, public speaking and thought leadership.
• Innovation & Industry Impact: Stay ahead of emerging technologies, contribute to thought leadership, and raise CreateFuture’s profile in the tech community.
• Team Leadership & Culture: Champion an inclusive, collaborative, and psychologically safe team environment. Help foster a culture aligned with our values.

We’d love to talk to you if you have

• A proven track record as a full-stack engineer with deep technical expertise across both front-end and back-end development.
• Strong hands-on experience with React and one of Java, .NET (or both).
• Experience designing and building scalable API services, particularly RESTful APIs.
• The ability to lead technical delivery while building trusted relationships with clients and translating their needs into effective solutions.
• A passion for mentoring engineers and contributing to the growth of a high-performing, inclusive team.
• Experience in supporting sales conversations and shaping how consultancy engagements are structured and delivered.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (ideally AWS or Azure) and modern software development best practices.

What we'll offer you

We challenge ourselves to go beyond the obvious and care deeply about our craft and customers. You’ll have ambitious projects to work on and plenty of opportunities to learn and grow. You’ll be part of a safe, supportive and friendly culture that looks after you, and you’ll join our team of genuinely great people.

Our benefits include:

• Total 35 days holiday (flexible bank holidays)
• Enhanced parental and adoption leave
• Pension – matched up to 5%

As this is a hybrid role, we’re looking for people within commuting distance of our hub locations (Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London) and who are flexible to travel to client sites and CreateFuture UK offices as required. We trust you to manage your own schedule to balance face-to-face time with clients, colleagues and working from home.

We create and reinforce a culture that rewards impact, not just activity. We trust our employees to work autonomously and promote ownership across all levels.

Next steps

Our Talent team aims to respond to all applications within a reasonable timeframe, regardless of progress. Here’s what to expect:

• 30-minute call with a Talent Acquisition Team member
• 60-minute Technical Consultancy Interview
• 30-minute Take-Home Code Review or 60-minute Live Coding plus a 60-minute Values interview

Our interview process is designed to help you gain insights into the role, team and business as a whole and to help us learn about your expertise and motivations.

Inclusion at CreateFuture

We believe diverse teams build better workplaces and better products. We want CreateFuture to be a place where people feel able to be themselves and do their best work. If you need adjustments or support during the application process, please let us know and we will help where possible.

We look forward to your application!

Additional notes: this description excludes non-essential boilerplate and non-job-related metadata to improve clarity.

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