Oliver Bernard
Staff Engineer
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Staff Engineer 🧑 💻
Fully Remote | UK based 📍
Paying £100k-£130k 💰
Oliver Bernard are working with a high-growth technology business going through a significant period of product and engineering transformation.
They’re looking for an experienced Staff Engineer / Principal Engineer / Architect to take ownership of architecture and technical strategy across multiple backend engineering teams. This is not a people management role and not a coding-focused Staff Engineer position.
They’re looking for someone who has been operating at Staff, Principal or Architect level for multiple years and is comfortable stepping away from day-to-day coding while remaining deeply technical.
The role is centred around architecture, technical strategy, stakeholder engagement and supporting engineering teams to solve complex problems and deliver meaningful change.
What you'll be doing:
- Work across 4–5 backend engineering teams, providing architectural direction and helping shape the evolution of the wider engineering environment.
- Own and drive technical strategy, architecture and target-state roadmaps.
- Set architectural direction across engineering teams.
- Design and review complex systems and help teams make the right architectural decisions.
- Work closely with Technical Leads and Senior Engineers to support delivery and solve difficult technical problems.
- Stay close to the technical detail without being responsible for writing production code day-to-day.
- Guide teams through architectural change, technical debt and complex engineering initiatives.
- Work across different domains rather than being tied to a single product area.
- Partner with Product Directors, Engineering Leadership and commercial stakeholders to ensure technical decisions align with wider business objectives.
- Influence senior stakeholders and gain buy-in for architectural approaches and technical strategy.
- Mentor and coach technical leaders, helping raise the engineering bar across the organisation.
- Lead architectural reviews and challenge proposed solutions where appropriate.
- Help shape the organisation's approach to AI-first engineering and the future of the SDLC.
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What we're looking for
- Several years operating at Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Architect or equivalent level.
- Proven experience setting architectural direction across multiple engineering teams.
- Strong backend architecture and system design experience.
- Experience working across large or complex systems and leading significant architectural change.
- Comfortable stepping away from day-to-day coding while remaining highly technical.
- Strong experience supporting engineering teams with architecture, design and complex technical decisions.
- No desire to move into people management — this is a purely technical leadership position.
- Able to influence without direct authority and bring multiple teams behind a technical strategy.
- Comfortable moving between detailed technical discussions and conversations with senior commercial and business stakeholders.
- Strong commercial awareness and an understanding of how technical decisions impact the wider business.
- Pragmatic approach to architecture, with an ability to balance technical quality against business priorities.
Ideal background
Ideally, you'll have worked within a similarly sized product-led organisation (roughly 250–1,000 employees) — where you've had to operate across multiple teams and navigate a level of organisational and commercial complexity. Experience in a scaling, product-led or transformation environment would be particularly relevant.
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This role isn't:
- A hands-on Software Engineering role where you're expected to spend most of your time coding.
- A people-management position.
- An architecture role where you simply produce designs and hand them over.
- A role focused on a single team or technical domain.
The expectation is that you're hands-on with the architecture, system design and technical problems, while supporting 4–5 backend teams to execute against the wider technical strategy.
Technology
The existing environment includes technologies such as: TypeScript | Node.js | React | Python | PHP | MySQL | AWS
You don't need to have experience across their stack. Broad architectural experience and the ability to work across different technologies and system architectures are more important.
The opportunity
This is a chance to have significant technical influence across multiple engineering teams while remaining close to the people and problems you're supporting.
You'll operate at the intersection of architecture, engineering, product and commercial strategy, helping determine not just how systems should be built, but where the technology needs to go to support the wider business.
If you've been operating at Staff / Principal / Architect level for several years, enjoy architecture and system design, and are looking to move away from coding and management without moving away from the technology itself, then please apply now!
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