Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer
Berlin - Permanent Employee, Full-Time, Hybrid working (3 days a week on site)
€120,000 - €150,000 + 20% Bonus + Holiday + Pension + Flexible Working Hours

Excellent opportunity for an experienced Principal Engineer to step into a senior leadership role with broad technical influence across teams and departments, contributing to a platform that is transforming the future of healthcare through cutting-edge AI and machine learning.

This company is a highly regarded spin-off from one of Europe's largest university hospitals and technical universities. Their mission is to revolutionise the diagnosis and treatment of complex diseases by combining state-of-the-art software engineering, cloud infrastructure, and ML-driven insights. With a collaborative, fast-growing team and a supportive leadership culture, they are building high-impact technology that directly affects lives.

In this role, you will act as the technical right-hand to the CTO, owning architecture across multiple teams, guiding technical strategy, and mentoring senior engineers. You'll shape core platform decisions while remaining close to the technology, influencing more than 60 engineers and helping teams deliver scalable, secure, and reliable systems.

The ideal candidate will be a master-level engineer with deep technical breadth, excellent mentoring skills, and experience making architectural decisions that span departments. You may have held titles such as Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, or even CTO at a smaller company. Leadership experience is valued, but a hands-on technical expert who's worked across teams and systems is key.

This is a fantastic opportunity to join a purpose-driven company where your expertise will help shape healthcare innovation at scale, while working alongside experienced engineers, data scientists, and stakeholders across disciplines.

The Role:
*Own and evolve the technical direction and architecture of core platforms and services
*Influence 60+ engineers across multiple teams with cross-cutting technical decisions
*Lead adoption of best practices across cloud infrastructure, DevSecOps, MLOps, and backend architecture
*Mentor and coach senior engineers to raise engineering standards organisation-wide
*Prototype solutions and work hands-on to enable technical excellence across teams
*Partner with stakeholders to align engineering strategy with business and product goals
*Hybrid working, 3 days a week on site in Berlin

The Person:
*10-15+ years' experience in software engineering, with technical leadership across teams or departments
*Strong architecture and system design background in distributed, event-driven systems
*Experience in cloud platforms (GCP preferred, AWS and/or Azure also welcome) and containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes)
*Proficiency in Python (important), with exposure to Java, Kotlin, TypeScript, and ML frameworks like PyTorch
*Ability to influence large-scale technical decisions across engineering organisations (100+ engineers)
*Strong communicator and mentor, with a track record of driving best practices and technical excellence