Principal Engineer - Conversational Banking & Gen AI

Principal Engineer - Digital Engineering at Barclays UK

The Principal Engineering role within Digital Engineering for BUK is a deep hands-on expert across all aspects of delivering a world-class digital banking experience for our retail banking customers. The role is pivotal within the leadership of engineering excellence across many teams and technology stacks and will have a broad impact on BUK business areas through various engagements and deliverables. Working with the CIO of the Digital Channels and other Managing Directors for platform and feature engineering, the role will drive the technical improvements in practices, solutions, tooling, and environments. In addition, they will develop products, solutions, frameworks, designs, and standards, and engage heavily in ensuring continuous improvement of our digital estate. Principal Engineers are also expected to develop and lead a community with their peers, engage in education across our general engineering population, and from time to time take active leadership across engineering teams where improvement is needed.

Accountabilities

• Lead specific engineering outcomes and be accountable for building upon the digital platform foundations to meet business demand.
• Own and deliver business outcomes as defined in partnership with product owners. Accountable for backlog quality and achieving the definition of ready and done for prioritised work items.
• Perform deep, CIO level engagement to identify and curate innovation and improvement opportunities for complex, high-scale system deliveries.
• Hire and develop others: Drive organisational shape to achieve Employee Value Proposition outcomes.
• Be a figurehead for organisational excellence, and execution discipline and effectively carry the brand of Digital Delivery as an ambassador.
• Be an active driver of our community and culture, helping develop experts and talent across Barclays UK.
• Engage actively in change activity and post-incident reviews – ensuring rigour and excellence is applied to service improvement.
• Work extensively to form leading relationships with BUK PODs and other BUs in the digital delivery space, forming and working on joint goals and solutions.

Director Expectations

• 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.
• Escalate breaches of policies/procedures appropriately.
• Foster and guide compliance, ensuring regulations are observed and 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/business divisions.
• Mandated as a spokesperson for the function and business division.

Leadership Behaviours

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.