Principal Engineer
Location: Manchester
Salary: £66,582 to £77,368 a year (Band 8b)
Recruitment and retention payment: 12.5% per annum
Vacancy Type: Permanent (Full‑time, Flexible working, Compressed hours)
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is seeking a Principal Engineer to provide senior leadership across the engineering, deployment, and production operation of digital applications and services.
This is a strategic role focused on ensuring services are technically robust and designed to meet real user needs. You will lead the engineering of modern, high‑quality live services, applying best practice in product development and user‑centred design from early discovery and prototyping through to secure, scalable, and maintainable production environments.
Working across the full product lifecycle, you will partner with NICE Business Service Owners, designers, and stakeholders to translate user needs, service outcomes, and policy intent into accessible, reliable, and well‑engineered digital services. You will act as a senior technical authority, ensuring that user‑centred design is realised through sound engineering decisions and that services meet recognised standards for accessibility, usability, and performance.
Main duties of the job
- Ensuring innovation and emerging technologies are adopted in a responsible, user‑focused way, delivering measurable improvements to live services.
- Reporting to the Associate Director of Engineering, you will lead technical direction across one or more teams and provide oversight across multiple programmes.
- Balancing hands‑on technical expertise with strategic leadership, governance and people management.
- Leading engineering delivery across large or complex digital services, ensuring successful transition from prototype to production.
- Owning and assuring technical decision making, governance and delivery processes across the product lifecycle.
- Setting and maintaining engineering standards aligned to GDS ServiceStandard, accessibility, security and DevOps best practice.
- Partnering with product and design leads to translate user‑centred design into robust, scalable digital services.
About us
The Engineering team at NICE designs, builds, and runs the digital services that underpin nationally relied upon health and care guidance used by millions of people. The team creates secure, reliable software that supports both internal guidance production and public‑facing services such as the NICE website, BNF, and Clinical Knowledge Summaries. Engineers work collaboratively in multidisciplinary teams, applying DevOps and secure by design principles to continuously improve live services and deliver meaningful digital outcomes.
Benefits
- Generous NHS Pension
- Flexible working – remote working, compressed hours, and flexible start/finish times
- Exclusive discounts via Blue Light Card
- 27 days annual leave plus bank holidays
- Inclusive staff networks – Women in NICE, Race Equality Network, Disability Advocacy, NICE and Proud
- Tailored development – personalised learning and development opportunities
Job responsibilities
To be considered for this role, you should be able to demonstrate the person specification criteria in the job advert in your application. Applicants should be able to demonstrate all essential criteria through the entirety of the recruitment process to be considered for the job.
Please note that this role may not be eligible for sponsorship under the Skilled Worker route. Please refer to the Direct Gov website for further information regarding eligibility.
Please note this vacancy may be closed early if sufficient suitable applications are received, so we encourage an early application.
Experience – Essential
- Significant experience leading delivery of complex digital products and services through the full delivery lifecycle.
- Proven ability to provide senior technical leadership while working closely with product and design disciplines.
Experience – Desirable
- Experience setting and assuring technical standards across multiple teams or services.
Essential Skills / Knowledge
- Excellent stakeholder engagement skills, with the ability to influence at senior levels.
- Strong people leadership skills, including managing and developing senior technical professionals.
- Highly skilled in modern software engineering, cloud platforms, DevOps and agile delivery.
Disclosure and Barring Service Check
This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.
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