Tech Lead / Principal Engineer – Contract
Location: London Canary Wharf – 4 days onsite (no flex)
Start Date: 2nd November 2026
Duration: Initial contract until 24th December, with potential extension
Outside IR35 - rate depending on experience
We're looking for an experienced Tech Lead / Principal Engineer to support a major financial services engagement with one of our consultancy partners.
This is a senior, client-facing technical role, focused on solution architecture, systems integration and technical leadership across complex mobile and backend platforms.
You'll be joining a fast-paced project, working closely with engineering teams and senior stakeholders to understand existing technology landscapes, identify architectural gaps and shape scalable, secure technical solutions.
The Role
- Lead solution architecture and technical design across mobile applications, backend services and integrations.
- Assess existing systems, map technical dependencies and identify architectural gaps.
- Define technical solutions and architectural blueprints, including greenfield components.
- Work closely with client engineering teams to connect systems and improve workflows.
- Provide technical leadership, guiding engineering decisions and ensuring best practices.
- Collaborate with product, design and delivery teams to ensure solutions meet business and technical requirements.
- Act as a trusted technical advisor, confidently engaging with senior technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Balance immediate delivery requirements with longer-term scalability, security and maintainability.
What We're Looking For
- 10+ years' software engineering experience, with a background operating as a Tech Lead, Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer or Solution Architect.
- Strong financial services experience, ideally across banking, payments or fintech.
- Proven mobile product experience, alongside strong backend architecture and systems integration expertise.
- Experience designing end-to-end solutions across APIs, microservices, cloud infrastructure and distributed systems.
- Strong backend technical background, ideally TypeScript/JavaScript, Java or .NET.
- Experience with AWS
- Strong understanding of architecture design patterns, API integrations, event-driven architecture and engineering best practices.
- Experience assessing existing technology environments, identifying gaps and recommending pragmatic technical solutions.
- Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to lead technical discussions and influence architectural decisions.