Principal Software Engineer

Role: Principal Software Engineer

Location: Wilmslow / Remote (UK)

We are The Citation Group - a collective of businesses dedicated to supporting small and medium-sized enterprises across a range of essential services. We know that running a business means juggling a lot. Our mission is to ease these pressures by providing expertise, guidance, and solutions that enable business leaders to focus on what they do best. From HR and Health & Safety to Cybersecurity, E-Learning, and ISO compliance, we’ve got you covered.

Citation Group has achieved strong growth through a combination of organic expansion and strategic acquisitions, continually broadening our expertise, services, and reach to create a one-stop shop that supports businesses across the UK, Canada and Australia.

Role Purpose

This is a hands-on engineering role at the heart of a significant platform transformation. You will be a core contributor to a squad that is actively changing how it builds, owns, and delivers software, and you will have real influence over the quality and direction of that work.

We are moving from a traditional release cycle to CI/CD, shifting shared services into team-owned boundaries, and embedding AI into how the team thinks and delivers. This is not a role where you maintain the status quo. You will be working alongside a Tech Lead to drive those changes forward, bringing technical craft and an AI-native approach to everything you build.

The right person for this role is someone who takes genuine pride in their work, wants to grow in a team that holds itself to a high standard, and is excited by the idea of building something better rather than just keeping things running.

Key Responsibilities

Hands-on Delivery

• Write production-quality code every day across the full stack, covering backend, front-end, and the infrastructure that supports it.

• Take ownership of features and workstreams from design through to deployment, delivering working software in shippable increments.

• Contribute to technical design and architecture discussions, bringing well-reasoned input and a practical perspective.

• Run technical spikes and proofs-of-concept to explore approaches and reduce uncertainty before committing to a direction.

• Manage your own technical debt responsibly, keeping the codebase in a state you are proud of.

Platform Transformation

• Play an active part in the decomposition of shared services into team-owned components, taking on defined pieces of that work and delivering them with care.

• Support the move to CI/CD by contributing to pipeline work, writing automated tests, and adopting trunk-based development as the default way of working.

• Build with observability in mind from the start, covering instrumentation, logging, and monitoring so that your team can see what their systems are doing in production.

• Contribute to the team's growing DevOps capability, taking on operational responsibility for the systems you build.

Code Quality and Engineering Practice

• Write clean, testable, secure code and hold that standard consistently, not just when it is convenient.

• Practise test-driven development and contribute to a culture where good testing is the norm, using AI to generate scaffolding and explore edge cases as part of that workflow.

• Participate actively in code review, giving and receiving feedback that improves the work and raises the bar for the whole team.

• Apply secure coding practices as a matter of course: dependency management, threat awareness, and security testing.

AI-Native Engineering

• Use AI natively in your engineering work, as part of how you think through problems, generate and review code, and build and test solutions.

• Contribute to AI-powered workflows that improve the team's delivery capability, whether that is in automation, testing, code generation, or observability.

• Engage actively with the team's AI agents and tooling, helping to refine and improve them as your understanding of what works deepens.

• Bring a critical eye to AI-generated output, verifying quality and maintaining the standards you would apply to anything else you ship.

Collaboration and Growth

• Work closely with your Tech Lead and teammates through pairing, mob programming, and shared problem-solving.

• Support less experienced engineers where you can, sharing knowledge through code review, pairing, and day-to-day conversation.

• Contribute to planning, refinement, stand-ups, reviews, and retrospectives as an engaged and thoughtful team member.

• Take an active interest in your own development, staying current with the technologies and practices the team uses and bringing new ideas back to the team.

Required Experience and Skills

Technical

• Solid experience as a software engineer with a proven ability to deliver complex features on production systems.

• Strong full-stack capability across backend and front-end development, with experience working with databases and cloud infrastructure.

• Practical experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and infrastructure-as-code.

• Working knowledge of cloud platforms (Azure/AWS) and containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes).

• Sound security fundamentals: secure coding, dependency management, and an awareness of common vulnerabilities.

• Experience working on evolving systems, including refactoring and improving existing codebases.

AI-Native Engineering Practice

• Demonstrable experience using AI as a genuine part of your engineering workflow, not just as a code completion tool.

• Comfortable working with AI-generated output critically, knowing how to verify, refine, and take responsibility for what ships.

Behavioural

• High standards: you care about the quality of your work and take pride in shipping something you can stand behind.

• Collaborative: you work well with others, share openly, and make the people around you better.

• Self-directed: you can take a piece of work, make sensible decisions, and see it through without constant oversight.

• Comfortable with change: you adapt well when priorities shift or approaches evolve, and you contribute positively to that process.

• Curious and committed to learning: you keep developing your skills and bring new thinking back to the team.

Nice to Have

• Experience in B2B SaaS or Citation domains such as HR, Health and Safety, Compliance, Certification, or eLearning.

• Experience building or contributing to AI agents or automated workflows in a production context.

• Experience with event-driven architectures, message queues, or reactive systems.

• Contributions to open source or active participation in technical communities.