Principal Software Engineer Software Architecture

Imagine what you could do here. At Apple new ideas have a way of becoming extraordinary products services and customer experiences very quickly. You bring passion and dedication to your job and theres no telling what you could is in search of an experienced Principal Software Engineer to join the Central Marketings Marketing Enablement team in London to drive technical architecture vision for its marketing products. This is a deeply hands-on high-impact role: you will work across portfolio of software products leading architecture discussions to decisions establishing architecture and designnstandards while contributing to software development.

Our Principal Engineers are technical leaders who shape how software is built across a portfolio rather than within a single product. You will own the cross-product architectural view understanding how our products fit together where the boundaries and dependencies sit how information moves between them and where duplication or fragility is accumulating and be able to articulate this to stakeholders. From that view you will define a target architecture and a roadmap to reach it setting the agenda for consolidation modernisation and structural improvement across existing products and sequencing that work so it can be prioritised and delivered alongside ongoing will define and steward the architectural standards our products are built on covering integration and interoperability security and data handling operability and the non-functional characteristics that determine whether a system holds up in production. You will make those standards adoptable through reference implementations templates and working examplesnrather than written rules alone. This is deliberately a hands-on role: you will prototype to de-risk significant decisions contribute production-quality code to shared foundations and engage directly in the hardest technical problems so your recommendations are grounded in what actually will review solution designs and technical proposals early enough to change the outcome establishing a repeatable assurance process across all delivery and advise on technology selection and significant investment decisions with an honest assessment of long-term cost flexibility and constraints. You will lead architecture discussions with both technical and non-technical audiences explaining choices in terms of cost risk and delivery impact and driving each to a clear documented decision. Much of your impact will come through influence rather than authority. As a senior technical contributor you will set engineering standards coach engineers on architectural thinking and grow this capability across the organisation.

Own and maintain the architectural view spanning our marketing products covering integration points data flows identity and access boundaries shared services and areas of architectural architecture for new products or major features and lead architecture discussions and design reviews to a decision with product and engineering teams driving technical excellence and contribute to growing engineering talent by setting design and engineering standards building reference implementations and shared components and mentoring engineersnEnsure our engineering foundations can support future growth by assessing them over time identifying opportunities to improve and working with product and engineering leadership to drive the implementation.

Extensive hands-on software engineering experience with a demonstrable track record of designing and building applications end to end including several years in a principal engineer architect or equivalent senior technical rolenDeep expertise in web application development with genuine fluency in at least one of the programming languages - Python or Java and the ability to reason about and review the others and hands-on experience with modern web frameworks and libraries such as React FastAPI Flask Django SpringBoot HibernatenStrong grounding in relational data modelling (Postgres or equivalent) and in the design of APIs service integrations and event-driven interfaces nPractical experience with externally-facing systems including authentication and authorisation content delivery rate limiting auditability and the associated security posturenTrack record of leading architecture conversations to a decision including with stakeholders holding competing priorities and limited technical background

Experience in advertising or marketing technology domains including ad trafficking campaign management and creative asset managementnExperience introducing an architecture practice ADRs review forums published standards into an organisation and driving genuine adoption rather than nominal compliancenExperience with platform and developer experience work that measurably reduced time to first release for other teams