Principal Engineer - AI & Platform Strategy

Our priority is to match the right person to the right role, and we never want salary to be a barrier to applying. Regardless of your current pay, we’ll ask about your salary expectations during the application process, and our Talent Team will have an open, honest conversation during the talent call to understand your skills and explore our salary options. If you have questions around salary, please feel free to ask us!

Salary Range : £100,000-£130,000

Location : Chiswick, London - Hybrid

Sponsorship: We are unable to offer sponsorship for this role

The Role

As a Principal Engineer, you are So Energy’s senior technical strategy authority, setting direction across architecture, platform capabilities, engineering standards, and long-term technical investment. You will operate at a company-wide level, shaping how technology enables business outcomes, reduces operational complexity, and scales sustainably.

With a particular focus on AI, you will lead So Energy’s approach to designing, building, and operating AI-enabled systems across the business. This includes AI implementation in customer operations and contact centres, automation and decision support, internal tooling, and platform capabilities that enable teams to ship faster with higher quality.

This role is not a “big architect” role in isolation. You will work across Engineering, Product, Data, and Operations to create alignment, establish standards, and drive adoption, ensuring So Energy becomes an AI-native organisation where teams can use AI safely, effectively, and confidently.

This is also a highly hands-on role. You are expected to stay close to the code and close to delivery, personally leading and delivering high-impact initiatives that materially improve customer outcomes, reduce operational complexity, and shift key business metrics. You will be accountable not just for technical direction, but for ensuring the work lands and moves the needle.

Your Impact

In this high-impact leadership role, you will shape the technical direction of So Energy, ensuring the organisation makes sound, consistent technology decisions that deliver commercial value, improve customer experience, and reduce cost-to-serve.

You will:

• Define and drive company-wide technical strategy and architectural direction, ensuring technology choices align to business outcomes, risk posture, and long-term scalability.

• Establish scalable platform patterns, engineering standards, and technical guardrails that enable teams to move fast without sacrificing reliability, security, or quality.

• Lead AI adoption as a strategic capability across the business, driving practical implementation, clear standards, and measurable outcomes.

• Increase AI literacy across Engineering, Product, Operations, and leadership, enabling teams to adopt AI safely and effectively, not just experiment.

• Personally lead and deliver So Energy’s highest-impact platform and AI initiatives, ensuring solutions are production-grade, adopted, and materially improve key business metrics.
  

Reporting to Muhammad Khan, Technology Director Role 👋

⭐ Why So Energy?

So Energy was created in 2015 because we knew energy suppliers could be better . Since then, we’ve grown rapidly but sustainably, with 300,000 customers and over 450 Energists (what we call our people). But we’re not done! We’re on the road to a net-zero future, and thanks to our partnership with ESB, we’re well on the way. We’re customer-centric, tech-led, and passionate about sustainability.

We’re driven to do our best for our customers, for each other, and for our planet. That’s why we’ve built a workplace culture that’s supportive, empowering, inclusive, and full of opportunities to grow and make an impact.

At So Energy, we take pride in our values-driven culture. We live and breathe by our six core values that guide everything we do:

• Clear

• Honest

• Ambitious

• Inquisitive

• Caring

• Sustainable
  

What you’ll be getting up to in this role:

• Partnering with the Director of Technology to define and deliver So Energy’s technical strategy and long-term architecture direction.

• Acting as So Energy’s technical strategy authority, shaping platform investment priorities, build vs buy decisions, and technical standards across the business.

• Leading AI as a strategic capability, defining how we design, build, and scale AI solutions across customer operations, automation, and engineering productivity.

• Establishing So Energy’s approach to agentic AI, including patterns, guardrails, and production standards (evals, observability, security, privacy, cost controls, and fail-safes).

• Driving AI literacy and adoption across Engineering, Product, and Operations through enablement, playbooks, and hands-on guidance.

• Working closely with the Head of Data to build scalable data platform foundations that enable AI, automation, and high-quality decision-making.

• Mentoring senior engineers and technical leaders, raising the bar for engineering quality, delivery, and technical decision-making.

• Taking personal accountability for delivering high-impact initiatives end-to-end, staying hands-on when needed to ensure work lands and materially improves business outcomes.
  

You’re a great match if:

Core Experience

• Proven experience operating as a Principal Engineer, Technical Architect, or equivalent senior technical authority in a modern product-led organisation.

• Demonstrable experience setting technical direction across multiple teams, balancing autonomy with strong standards and guardrails.

• Deep system design and architecture capability, including designing scalable, resilient, secure distributed systems.

• Strong hands-on engineering fundamentals, including recent experience writing, reviewing, and reasoning about production code.

• Strong stakeholder influence: able to challenge constructively, align senior stakeholders, and create clarity in ambiguity.

• Strong leadership experience mentoring senior engineers and raising the technical bar across the organisation.
  

AI, Agentic Systems & AI-Native Engineering (Essential)

• Strong experience building and deploying production AI systems, including LLM-enabled applications and automation.

• Practical experience with agentic AI systems (tool use, orchestration, multi-step workflows, decision loops, human-in-the-loop patterns).

• Experience with AI frameworks and orchestration tooling such as:

• LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, or equivalent

• Strong working knowledge of modern ML/LLM platforms on at least one major cloud:

• AWS (e.g. Bedrock, SageMaker, event-driven architecture), and/or

• GCP (e.g. Vertex AI, BigQuery ML, cloud-native data + ML pipelines)

• Strong understanding of what “good” looks like for production AI:

• evaluation strategies and regression testing (AI evals)

• prompt/version control and release management

• observability and monitoring for AI systems

• cost controls, latency trade-offs, model selection

• privacy, security, compliance-by-design and auditability

• Strong practical use of AI-native coding workflows and tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini Code Assist, Codex, or equivalent, with the ability to embed these ways of working into engineering culture.

Desirable

• Experience with contact-centre platforms, ideally Amazon Connect, and/or AI-enabled customer operations tooling.

• Experience in highly regulated industries (energy, fintech, utilities, telecoms).

• Familiarity with platform engineering, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, and developer experience “golden paths”.
  

Research shows that some underrepresented people are less likely to apply for a role unless they are 100% qualified. We believe your experience, skills, and passion will set you apart. We encourage you to apply and tell us about your journey, even if you don’t tick all the boxes.

📅 Our Hiring Process:

1. Talent Screen - 20 minutes Teams call

2. Hiring Manager competency-based Interview

3. Technical Interview - Technical assessment of your capabilities across Platform & AI tools

4. Final stage interview and presentation with Senior leadership

APPLICATIONS CLOSE ON 23rd if Feb 2026

🤝What’s in it for you?

Smart Working Charters

• Hybrid working – Each team has its own Smart Working Charter. Ask your talent partner for more details.

Growth & Development

• Personalised learning & development budgets – to support your growth journey, L&D buddies to guide you along the way.

• Educational Sponsorships – like Code First Girls.

• Internal learning platform – with thousands of valuable resources.

Pay & Reward

• Up to 10% performance bonus – based on company and personal performance.

• Annual Salary Reviews – to ensure we remain competitive in the market.

• Commitment to being a real living wage provider .

Time Off That Matters

• Your birthday off – it only comes once a year, so enjoy it!

• 3 So Giving Days – spend time supporting a cause you care about.

• Enhanced family leave – supporting you through every life chapter.

Health & Wellbeing

• Unmind – Access to personalised coaching or therapy to support your mental wellbeing.

• Physical Support – Free eye tests, flu vaccinations.

• Access to Perkbox – Additional wellbeing & savings benefits.
  

• Menopause Policy – To ensure all employees are being taken care off.

Belonging & Recognition

• Affinity Groups – join one of our employee groups to foster meaningful connections.

• Bi-annual Value Awards – because your hard work deserves recognition.

• Monthly events – to find balance and bring our team together.

• Charitable Fundraising – to give back to our communities.
  

🧩 Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging

As a Disability Confident Committed employer, we encourage applications from everyone, and we will ensure fair and accessible recruitment for all. At So Energy, we’re committed to cultivating an environment that promotes diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. We are a global community, and we believe our unique qualities should be celebrated as they are critical to our innovation. It’s essential to us that you bring your authentic self to work every single day, no matter your age, ethnicity, religion, citizenship, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, caring responsibilities, neurodiversity, or otherwise . Inclusion isn’t just an initiative at So Energy. We strive to embed it throughout our entire culture.