Principal Software Development Engineer

GoCardless is a global bank payment company. Over 100,000 businesses, from start-ups to household names, use GoCardless to collect, manage and send bank payments through Direct Debit, real-time payments and open banking. With US$130bn+ processed annually across 30+ countries, we handle recurring and one-off payments without the chasing, stress, or expensive fees. Our end-to-end payment platform also features AI-powered solutions to improve payment success and reduce fraud, alongside connections to over 350 platforms businesses use everyday.

We are headquartered in the UK, with teams and operations spanning North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

The technical challenges of building GoCardless span from simplifying building banking schemes to optimising the time to render the dashboard. 

You will enjoy being a Principal Software Engineer at GoCardless if:

• You’re looking to champion a great engineering culture within GC and in the wider engineering community; 
• You enjoy collaborating and learning from people from various backgrounds and experiences; 
• You want to feel proud of the work you’re doing and its impact on real customers.

Our engineers contribute to the engineering culture within and outside of GoCardless: they contribute to Open Source Software projects (see our Github), and share learnings in post-mortems, conferences and on our blog.

Our technologies: We endeavour to build simple, reliable systems and we believe in using the best technologies for each task.

Technologies we use across GoCardless include: Ruby on Rails, Golang, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Postgres, BigQuery, Kubernetes, Elasticsearch, Prometheus, Google Cloud (GCP).

This is a new role based in Lisbon, created to strengthen the technical leadership within the Global Growth group. In this role you will:

• Own the architecture of our dashboard platform and the design system used across the company
• Bring technical depth to de-risks our highest-impact initiatives
• Act as a technical multiplier for engineers across multiple teams — all while staying hands-on enough to lead the hardest problems yourself. 
• Report into engineering leadership for Global Growth and work alongside engineering managers in the group and Principal Engineers across the company.

• Proactive Leadership: You don't wait to be asked - you identify problems, develop options, and drive solutions. When you need help, you explicitly ask for it. You spot issues and either fix them or bring options to leadership
• Empowered Decision-Making: You're ready to own technical decisions across multiple teams and escalate blocking issues effectively. This role has real authority and mandate, not just influence
• Systems Thinking: You can see across the entire domain, understand interdependencies, and make architectural decisions that balance immediate needs with long-term flexibility
• Executive Communication: You communicate using metrics and data to support your recommendations, and you're comfortable presenting technical strategies to executives and working with senior stakeholders

• Full-stack engineering background with deep front-end architecture experience and strong, hands-on back-end expertise
• Track record operating as a senior technical leader across multiple teams: setting direction, mentoring other engineers, and being trusted by both engineers and senior stakeholders.
• Collaboration — we work together across different parts of the organisation to achieve the best outcome possible
• Pragmatism — we balance quality and time to delivery differently depending on the situation and business need
• Strong communication skills — you can explain a technical trade-off to a non-technical stakeholder as easily as you can to another engineer.

We don’t expect you to meet every requirement. If you’re excited by this role, we encourage you to apply.