Principal Engineer

CreateFuture is fast becoming the UK’s most recognisable digital consultancy, with years of experience building digital products and services for major organisations whilst putting our people first. We have offices in the centre of Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester and London as well as remote employees located throughout the country. We are a team of creators - whether that’s code, project plans, go to market strategies, culture initiatives, marketing campaigns, large language models or people policies.

And together, with our clients, we create the future. This has seen us collaborate and partner across a multitude of industries and sectors, with the likes of PayPal, Adidas, NatWest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert to name just a few. Our reputation as a partner determined to deliver high-quality, robust and thoughtful products has enabled us to scale to over 500 people in the last couple of years, and it is our amazing people - along with the safe, supportive and friendly culture we have built - that makes CreateFuture a great place to work.

Don’t just take our word for it though, we have been recognised by Best Workplaces UK multiple years in a row - across a number of categories - and our employee exit rate is astonishingly low. Join us on our journey… Let’s create something awesome, together, today.

About This Role

The bar has moved. Five years ago a strong engineer was measured by what they could build and how well they could mentor others to build it. Today, with Claude Code and agents, we produce quality work at a speed that would have looked superhuman in 2022.

What separates exceptional from good is no longer typing speed or local craftsmanship. It is the complete package: architecture, deep engineering foundations, communication, system thinking, and the judgement to direct both your own intelligence and AI toward outcomes that matter. Exceptional people at this level are not the best implementer in the room; they are the person whose specifications, decisions, and review judgement compound into systems that work in production and that others (and agents) can build on.

They are a force multiplier, they hold a room at the highest levels, and clients treat them as the SME by default. Your mindset The mindset is the engine, and it is almost impossible to teach retrospectively. You are outcome obsessed, not output obsessed and you care whether the problem was actually solved - you resist the ego instinct to admire a clever solution and ask whether it was needed at all.

You are intellectually honest about uncertainty, taking a trust-but-verify approach and assuming the surprising bug is the one that will burn. You are deeply pragmatic, which matters at CreateFuture where pace counts: you have outgrown the religious wars about platforms, languages and patterns, you hold opinions loosely, and you decide for the systems in front of you, not the ones you wish you had. You have a bias toward delivery: the smallest thing that works, then iterate, treating documents and meetings as means to that end.

And you are relentlessly curious beyond any immediate need, wanting to know how the database actually stores things or why a Claude Opus inference call costs what it does, which keeps you several layers ahead while the rest of the team is still reading the API docs. AI as the accelerant For a Principal to be truly exceptional, this is now already a first-class competency in your arsenal, not a side skill. An engineer who is brilliant by last year's standards but not fluent with AI is not exceptional in 2026.

In practice that means: Setting AI up to succeed. You treat context engineering as a craft (the right files, specs, examples and constraints), and you architect systems with clean interfaces, good naming, machine-readable specs and knowledge bases so the codebase is a quality baseline AI can work on later. No separate ivory-tower architect required.

Reviewing and choosing well.