Principal Product Engineer

Principal Product Engineer (1529)

• Technology
• Permanent

This role offers a competitive package, hybrid working (1 day a week in the London office, typically Thursday), 28 days holiday a year plus Bank Holidays and 11% pension from the second year!

Salary range £90,000 - £105,000

Who are we?

Which? is the UK's consumer champion, here to make life simpler, fairer and safer for everyone. As an organisation we're not for profit and all for making consumers more powerful. Come and champion consumers with us it's important work. As people we're brave, caring, rigorous and insightful in the way we connect with each other to make change happen.

Why?

We are introducing a number of Principal Product Engineers to allow us to meet increased expectations on product engineering as we continue our organisational transformation to become increasingly product led.

A key part of the transformation is embracing modern engineering practices enabling us to deliver better products faster. We are looking for Principal Product Engineers that have worked in environments where product & engineering are seen as critical drivers of business success and can help accelerate our journey to become a more mature and impactful product engineering team.

What do we expect?

You will provide overarching technical direction across 2-3 cross-functional product teams, supporting and guiding several Tech Leads and Engineering Managers, operating within closely related domains. We believe that great Principal Engineers have the following characteristics:

• Problem Solver: You will be given our most ambiguous and impactful engineering problems/opportunities. In many cases this will require working across multiple teams and supporting them to deliver successful product outcomes. You will be an influential member of the team and have strong insights on where we need to focus to mature our engineering org. Commercially minded with experience of driving significant revenues or cost savings through technology & product innovation.
• Practice Evolutionary Architecture: You will guide architectural direction across your domains and the wider product engineering org. Our teams own their software end-to-end and you will be comfortable working across front-end and back-end (we appreciate you may bias towards one or the other).
• Multiplier: you will level up engineers in your area through use of standards and modern engineering approaches. Ability to mentor and develop the next generation of Technical Leaders.
• Hands on (when needed): In general you will work through others and set high level direction and standards. However, you will retain the ability to be hands-on when needed, e.g helping with incidents or pairing when required. Our key technologies are JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Node.js and AWS.

You will become an expert in a number of business domains and contribute to strategy through the lens of product and technology. As one of our most capable technologists you will report into the Head Of Product Engineering and be a trusted strategic thinker.

What kind of work might I do?

• Our content publishing and web presentation platform serves millions of users per month. We need to review our monolithic web architecture to be able to support increased scale in terms of visiting members and more teams working on the platform. What is a suitable architecture and how do we get there incrementally?
• We see a huge opportunity in unlocking value from our data. This could be:
  • Gaining a deeper understanding of how our members use our site to enable us to provide better recommended content
  • Reducing effort and time to build data products and internal tools. We have lots of data that has the potential to be monetised.
  • Search and conversational AI - helping our members quickly find the answers they need.
• We are currently transitioning from a centralised DevOps ownership model to a build it, run it ownership culture. You will play a key role in helping teams that have limited operational experience become more comfortable and effective working in this way.

• You will work closely with Heads of Product Engineering, Engineering Managers, Principal Engineer and Product Managers to create and deliver a product engineering strategy

How might I progress my career?

You can continue on the technical leadership track and take on increasingly ambitious impactful problems with increasing span of ownership and influence. Alternatively you may swap to our management track and become an Engineering Manager with a progression route to Head/Director level roles.

Want to find out more about our Amazing team here at Which?

Interview Process

• Call with a recruiter by phone (typically 30 minutes), followed by
• Meet Head of Product Engineering via Google Meet (approximately 30 minutes)
  • Opportunity for you to learn more about the role, answer any questions you have, and provide some examples of providing technical direction across multiple teams and driving product outcomes through technology.
• System Design & Technical Interview via Google Meet (60 Mins)
• Leadership Interview covering Technical capabilities, leadership and Product knowledge

We also have these benefits for you to consider:

• 28 days holiday + all bank holidays
• 35 hour working week
• Hybrid way of working, with patterns agreed at team level, based on the requirements for the role
• Award winning pension scheme when you pay in 3%, Which? pays in 6% (rising to 11% after one year of service.)
• Discount site Sodexo which offers large off every day shopping
• Eligible to join Charity Worker Discount scheme further savings and offers
• Annual Bonus (up to 5% currently, depending on employee and company performance)
• Healthcare insurance & Private medical insurance and opportunity to participate in Vitality rewards programme - at 6 months
• Free life assurance cover (worth at least 4 times your annual salary)

About Which?

All our roles are now hybrid and we will supply you with the tools and technologies to enable you to do this. Similarly, all interviews will be conducted by google hangouts or equivalent video conferencing technologies.

Which? is the UK's consumer champion, here to make life simpler, fairer and safer for everyone. As an organisation we're not for profit and all for making consumers more powerful.

We impact in key areas such as consumer rights, scams, data protection and unfair pricing. Our investigations go deep and our expert advice is completely impartial. Same goes for our product reviews our rigorous tests and expert recommendations help consumers to make better decisions. Come and champion consumers with us it's important work. As people we're brave, caring, rigorous and insightful in the way we connect with each other to make change happen.

At Which? we value diversity and we're committed to creating an inclusive culture where everyone is able to be themselves and to reach their full potential. We want to receive applications from all regardless of age, gender identity, disability, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, religion or belief, race or ethnic origin, sex, sexual orientation, transgender status, social economic background. We believe that a diverse workforce helps us to understand and create a positive impact for consumers. We want to ensure that everybody can apply and be part of our recruitment processes, and therefore when required we make reasonable adjustments to accommodate our candidates.

We re committed to making sure our application process is accessible to everyone who would like to apply for any of our vacancies! Please reach out if you need us to provide an alternative application method to support your accessibility needs.