Principal Engineer

Skills this role screens for

About the role

ABOUT MOTORWAY

Motorway is the UK's largest online car-selling platform. We connect private sellers directly with over 8,000 dealers nationwide. Our online platform helps sellers achieve great prices for their cars while giving dealers fast, reliable access to the stock they want for their dealerships. Founded in 2017, our award-winning, technology-led approach has redefined the experience of selling a car. Motorway is backed by some of the world’s leading technology investors, having raised £143 million in Series C funding.

This is a unique opportunity to join a fast-growing scale-up at a crucial phase of growth and help change an industry for the better.

The company

ABOUT THE TEAM

Hi, I'm Mariot, I lead Engineering here at Motorway. We're around 70 engineers across product teams, building the marketplace and all services around that handles hundreds of vehicle transactions every day. We care about delivering value to the business, getting the architecture engineering sound, keeping the production bar high, and being early and deliberate about the technology we adopt.

We have been early adopters of GenAI for software engineering, we've built a reputation for that, and we'd like to keep earning it. AI is enabling us to deliver faster at a much higher quality software while easing the maintenance of our existing services.

The work

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're looking for a Principal Engineer to set technical direction and evolve engineering practices across Motorway, reporting to the Director of Engineering. This is a broad role: your remit spans multiple product areas and every engineering specialties, and your decisions will shape what we build, what we buy, and what we retire.

You'll work with engineering leadership, product, and other functions stakeholders to continuously evolve our overall architecture and practices, and with our senior and staff engineers to turn that direction into working software.

You will own our relationships with AWS on the engineering side, our main cloud provider. It's the foundation of our platform and one of our most important partnerships. In practice, we expect you to lead the following activities:

You'll represent Motorway on stage at external events and in the wider engineering community, and you'll set the standard for how engineers here present their work internally.

You'll also lead on our adoption of AI for software engineering. We give engineers access to the latest models through Kiro, and we want someone who can define what good looks like when domain depth, AI-enabled breadth, and rigorous evaluation all have to work together.

• Frequently meet AWS representatives getting access to latest services and features, share feedback on our usage and needs, and be an early tester and adopter of new services/
• Identify new services we could adopt to continuously improve our reliability and ability to build new services and features at pace for the business.
• Share internally good practices on software engineering at the edge and usage of AWS services, including continuously updating technical recommendations for humans and agents.

The work

IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL

• Set technical strategy across multiple product areas, and make the commercial case for it to leadership with data rather than assertion
• Identify cross-cutting architectural risks and resolve them before they block us at scale
• Set engineering standards, architectural patterns, and documentation norms, including the writing precision that makes specs reliable inputs for both engineers and agent systems
• Raise the reliability, observability, and security bar across engineering: SLO philosophy, incident management standards, production readiness, and threat models that hold up in the AI era
• Be a force of innovation on AI for Software Engineering.: Monitor our LLM usage, latest models trial and evaluation, technical debt modernisation through AI agents.
• Develop staff engineers and technical leads, multiplying leadership capac