Principal Software Engineer

The Senior Manager (Product Delivery) is a critical technical leadership role responsible for defining, governing, and driving the integration strategy connecting Front Office's customer-facing touchpoints - e-commerce checkout, in-store POS, food-service POS/kiosks, convenience-store checkout, and the customer app - to the rest of the enterprise. You are not a specialist in any single integration tool or middleware product you are the expert in how Front Office systems talk to everything else - SAP, payment systems, WMS, CDP/loyalty platforms, and other foundation systems - regardless of which platform carries the traffic. Your mission is to ensure seamless, secure, and appropriately fast data and process flow between customer touchpoints and core enterprise systems, so that new channels can be onboarded quickly and reliably.

Key Responsibilities

I. Strategy & Architecture

• Integration Strategy: Define and champion the integration roadmap and architecture connecting all Front Office touchpoints to enterprise systems, aligned with the team's north star of a single, repeatable integration layer.

• Standardisation: Establish and govern integration standards, patterns, and best practices (API-first, event-driven, batch where appropriate) so that onboarding a new channel or system is a repeatable exercise, not a rebuild.

• Connector & Pattern Selection: Evaluate and choose the right integration pattern per use case - REST/SOAP APIs, event streaming, batch/file transfer, webhooks - based on each system's transaction volume, latency tolerance, and failure-recovery needs. You are platform-agnostic: comfortable working across whatever integration tooling the enterprise already runs (iPaaS, message brokers, SAP-native interfaces, etc.) without requiring expertise in one specific vendor product.

• Latency & Frequency Design: Make and document explicit trade-offs on synchronous vs. asynchronous flows, real-time vs. near-real-time vs. batch sync, and how these differ meaningfully across channels - a POS terminal, an e-commerce order, and a food-service kiosk do not have the same tolerance for delay or failure.

• Technology Evaluation: Evaluate and recommend integration approaches and tooling that improve reliability and speed to market for Front Office, in partnership with the Cloud Architect.

II. Project Execution & Delivery

• Integration Management: Lead the technical planning and execution of multiple concurrent integration projects at once - spanning different channels, different enterprise systems, and different stakeholder groups.

• Cross-Functional Alignment: Act as the primary technical liaison between business and ops stakeholders (retail ops, finance, payments/compliance) and the engineering teams, translating business requirements into integration specifications.

• Delivery Oversight: Define integration test strategies, ensure quality assurance across channels, and provide hands-on support during rollout and early-life/hyper-care phases.

• Risk Mitigation: Proactively identify and sequence the highest-complexity integrations early - e.g., a channel with tight latency needs or a system with limited API surface - rather than let them surface late.

• Design Authority: Provide hands-on architectural design and review for complex, cross-channel integration work.

III. Governance & Operational Excellence

• Documentation: Maintain clear, current documentation of integration architecture, data flows, and connector specifications across all touchpoints and enterprise systems.

• Performance Optimisation: Monitor the performance and reliability of integrated flows, driving optimisation where latency or frequency mismatches cause friction (e.g., inventory sync lag, payment reconciliation delays).

• Security & Compliance: Ensure integration solutions meet relevant data governance, cybersecurity, and payments compliance standards (e.g., PCI-DSS, local data protection regulation).

• Vendor & Partner Coordination: Work with external vendors, payment processors, and system integrators to review their proposed integration designs against Front Office's standards.

• Mentorship: Mentor and upskill other engineers on integration design principles and cross-system thinking, without requiring them to specialize in a single platform.

Qualifications & Requirements

Technical Skills

• At least 10+ years of experience in software/systems engineering, with recent experience at Staff or Principal Engineer level (or equivalent scope), including hands-on ownership of enterprise integration work - preferably in retail, e-commerce, or omnichannel commerce.

• Deep expertise in integration patterns: APIs (REST/SOAP), event-driven architecture (Kafka, message queues), batch/file transfer (SFTP, EDI), and webhook-based integration.

• Hands-on experience integrating with major enterprise systems common in retail - ERP (SAP or equivalent), POS, WMS, CRM/CDP, loyalty platforms - with no requirement of expertise in any specific iPaaS or middleware brand.

• Proven ability to reason about latency, throughput, and consistency trade-offs across systems with very different transaction profiles (high-frequency POS vs. batch-oriented ERP vs. event-driven payments).

• Working knowledge of payments processing across channels (card-present vs. card-not-present, contactless, wallets) and the compliance implications of each.

• Familiarity with cloud architecture (any major provider) and integrating cloud-native applications with on-prem or hybrid enterprise systems.

Soft Skills & Education

• Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).

• Stakeholder Management: Exceptional communication skills, able to explain integration trade-offs to both engineers and non-technical business/ops leaders.

• Program Management: Demonstrated ability to run multiple concurrent technical projects with competing priorities, timelines, and stakeholders.

• Leadership: Ability to set technical direction and mentor other engineers without necessarily having formal management authority.

• Problem-Solving: Strong analytical skills and a decisive approach to ambiguous, cross-system technical challenges.

• Certification in enterprise architecture frameworks (e.g., TOGAF) is a plus, but not required.