Principal Software Engineer - Software Architecture

Apple

2d • Onsite

About The Position

Apple is seeking an experienced Principal Software Engineer to join the Central Marketing's Marketing Enablement team in London. This role is focused on driving the technical architecture vision for marketing products. It is a hands-on position where you will lead architecture discussions, establish standards, and contribute to software development across a portfolio of software products. You will own the cross-product architectural view, understand product interdependencies, identify areas for improvement, and define a target architecture and roadmap. You will define and steward architectural standards covering integration, security, data handling, operability, and non-functional characteristics, making them adoptable through practical examples. The role involves prototyping, contributing code to shared foundations, and tackling complex technical problems. You will review solution designs, advise on technology selection, and lead architecture discussions with diverse audiences, influencing outcomes through expertise. As a senior technical contributor, you will set engineering standards, coach engineers, and foster architectural thinking across the organization.

Requirements

• Extensive hands-on software engineering experience, with a demonstrable track record of designing and building applications end to end.
• Several years in a principal engineer, architect, or equivalent senior technical role.
• Deep expertise in web application development.
• Genuine fluency in at least one of the programming languages - Python, or Java and the ability to reason about and review the others.
• Hands-on experience with modern web frameworks and libraries such as React, FastAPI, Flask, Django, SpringBoot, Hibernate.
• Strong grounding in relational data modelling (Postgres or equivalent).
• Experience in the design of APIs, service integrations, and event-driven interfaces.
• Practical experience with externally-facing systems, including authentication and authorisation, content delivery, rate limiting, auditability, and the associated security posture.
• Track record of leading architecture conversations to a decision, including with stakeholders holding competing priorities and limited technical background.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in advertising or marketing technology domains, including ad trafficking, campaign management, and creative asset management.
• Experience introducing an architecture practice — ADRs, review forums, published standards — into an organisation, and driving genuine adoption rather than nominal compliance.
• Experience with platform and developer experience work that measurably reduced time to first release for other teams.

Responsibilities

• Own and maintain the architectural view spanning marketing products, covering integration points, data flows, identity and access boundaries, shared services, and areas of architectural drift.
• Design architecture for new products or major features and lead architecture discussions and design reviews to a decision with product and engineering teams, driving alignment.
• Drive technical excellence and contribute to growing engineering talent by setting design and engineering standards, building reference implementations and shared components, and mentoring engineers.
• Ensure engineering foundations can support future growth by assessing them over time, identifying opportunities to improve, and working with product and engineering leadership to drive implementation.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed