Principal Engineer - Advanced Engineering

Key Accountabilities

• Engage with Business Unit partners on the delivery of key initiatives that support optimisation of their business flows. Support the upskilling of teams in those Business Units as part of the delivery.
• Drive the creation of solutions that meet the non-functional needs for a concrete business initiative, while delivering in a way that’s generic enough to apply more widely to solutions across the firm.
• Support appropriate innovation across the domain, enabling the use of modern technologies tied to realisable business benefit.
• Partner with product and engineering teams across the firm to enhance and integrate frameworks and tools that remove toil from engineering activities, enabling delivery teams to move at pace, leverage modern design patterns, and sustain a high bar of quality.
• Perform deep, CIO level program engagement to identify and curate innovation and improvement opportunities for complex, high-scale system deliveries across the global firm.
• Scope opportunities and drive PoC/PoV on emerging solutions and technologies, staying ahead of anticipated trends and helping teams adopt novel approaches where skills may be lacking.
• Be a figurehead for engineering excellence.
• Be an active driver of our community of engineers, helping develop expert engineers across the firm.
• Partner strongly across cyber security, infrastructure and cloud spaces, supporting the ongoing evolution of the organisation and our ability to balance risks and innovation appropriately.

Stakeholder Management and Leadership

• The role holder will work across many domains and be an expert in stakeholder management, relationship building and communication. Areas will include working across DE areas (security, application, infrastructure, data), technology functions (Group Technology, CSO etc) and CIO domains (business areas).
• The role will partner closely with teams across key business areas, as well as CTO wide, as a technical thought leader.
• Ability to influence and communicate across a senior audience both inside and outside CTO – able to align teams and the organisation to key goals.
• Adaptive leadership – transparent, creative, ability to assimilate information and learn quickly on the job, with a degree of high emotional intelligence to forge lasting and trusting relationships with delivery areas.
• Ability to lead change and transformation in a matrix structure – able to work within other teams to create community transformation from within.
• Challenges established norms and ways of working when they are wasteful. Be able to navigate complex systems and problems to achieve an outcome, whilst also being able to challenge the status quo on sub optimal processes and decisions.
• Ultimately, passionate about making CTO and Barclays better.

Decision-making and Problem Solving

• An expert in critical design thinking and approaches of software systems, including high performance, mission critical applications.
• Pragmatic approach to solving problems – understands key facts and able to quickly cut through to make changes that will have a lasting impact.
• Able to get into the detail to reach the heart of a problem and set out appropriate solutions to stakeholders and senior management.
• Decision maker – takes personal accountability and comfortable doing so.
• Is able to clearly articulate decisions and their rationale to multiple stakeholders including architects, engineers, and executives.
• Is able to lead by example – able to spend time demonstrating through hands on delivery. Should be an active software engineer.

Purpose of the role

To drive technical excellence and innovation by leading the design and implementation of robust software solutions, providing mentorship to engineering teams, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and contributing to strategic planning to ensure the delivery of high-quality solutions aligned with business objectives.

Accountabilities

• Provision of guidance and expertise to engineering teams to ensure alignment with best practices and foster a culture of technical excellence.
• Contribution to strategic planning by aligning technical decisions with business goals, anticipating future technology trends, and providing insights to optimize product roadmaps.
• Design and implementation of complex, scalable, and maintainable software solutions, considering long-term viability and business objectives.
• Mentoring and coaching to junior and mid-level engineers to foster professional growth and knowledge sharing, elevating the overall skillset and capabilities of the organization.
• Collaboration with business partners, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions and ensure a cohesive approach to product development.
• Innovation within the organization by identifying and incorporating new technologies, methodologies, and industry practices into the engineering process.

Director Expectations

• To manage a business function, providing significant input to function wide strategic initiatives. Contribute to and influence policy and procedures for the function and plan, manage and consult on multiple complex and critical strategic projects, which may be business wide.
• They manage the direction of a large team or sub-function, leading other people managers and embedding a performance culture aligned to the values of the business. Or for an individual contributor, they lead organisation wide projects and act as deep technical expert and thought leader, identifying new ways of working and collaborating cross functionally. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions.
• Provide expert advice to senior functional management and committees to influence decisions made outside of own function, offering significant input to function wide strategic initiatives.
• Manage, coordinate and enable resourcing, budgeting and policy creation for a significant sub-function.
• Escalates breaches of policies / procedure appropriately.
• Foster and guide compliance, ensure regulations are observed that relevant processes in place to facilitate adherence.
• Focus on the external environment, regulators, or advocacy groups to both monitor and influence on behalf of Barclays, when appropriate.
• Demonstrate extensive knowledge of how the function integrates with the business division / Group to achieve the overall business objectives.
• Maintain broad and comprehensive knowledge of industry theories and practices within own discipline alongside up-to-date relevant sector / functional knowledge, and insight into external market developments / initiatives.
• Use interpretative thinking and advanced analytical skills to solve problems and design solutions in often complex/ sensitive situations.
• Exercise management authority to make significant decisions and certain strategic decisions or recommendations within own area.
• Negotiate with and influence stakeholders at a senior level both internally and externally.
• Act as principal contact point for key clients and counterparts in other functions/ businesses divisions.
• Mandated as a spokesperson for the function and business division.

All Senior Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.