Job Title: Principal Engineer

Reports to: CTO/VP Engineering

Direct Reports: None

This is a remote role but must be based in the UK

Closing: 2/4/24

Kooth is a fast-growing business with a social purpose. Listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE:KOO), our mission is to provide welcoming and effective digital mental health support.

Working in partnership with the NHS, we are already the UK’s largest digital mental health platform for young people aged 10-25. We use the collective insight from over one million hours of professional support we have provided to guide people to self-help, community support, and professional help that matches their wants, needs, and goals in life. 

Why this role?

This is an opportunity to apply your talents to the youth mental health crisis.

This is an incredibly exciting time to join Kooth. We are building the future of personalised digital mental health care and have an opportunity in 2024 to better serve an increasing number of young people across the world. Our new platform has been rebuilt from the ground up (on modern tech and concepts) to support this journey, and there are plenty of interesting problems left for us to solve together.

What you will do

Engineering leadership

• Solve problems and deliver solutions that impact the engineering organisation as a whole
• Identify and take ownership of technical challenges: identifying and formalising the problem, devising a solution, leading its implementation, and training the rest of the organisation to leverage it.
• Raise the bar for all of product and engineering; be a force multiplier in your interactions with teams and team members.
• Be a coach, advisor, and mentor, as well as a technology and industry expert. You are capable of mentoring anyone, including your more senior counterparts, in your particular areas of expertise.
• You recognise that the best results come though working as a team but you are also able to work independently when required, including e.g. mitigations, estimation, prediction, design.
• Be proactive, model a bias for action, lead on quick decision-making, and have a focus on delivery and outcomes.

Technical oversight

• Be responsible, with your fellow Principal Engineers and the Principal Architect, for our architecture being fit for purpose.
• Design more complex parts of the system, producing design documents and driving collaboration and a shared understanding of technical direction.
• “Execution through influence”. Whilst senior engineers are individual contributors, a principal engineer is an influencing contributor.
• Guide tech leads where necessary and use your technical expertise and your view of the wider Kooth landscape to help achieve the best outcomes.
• Be deeply involved in cross-functional planning for work you’ve committed to, and take ownership of outcomes based on your decisions.
• Document "load-bearing" decisions, so people coming later can understand why we made those decisions & what else we considered. Socialise those documents and make sure they're discoverable.
• Be able to break down large technical workstreams into manageable chunks and communicate those to others so the work can be better managed, and understand implementation, e.g. what must be done in which order, what work could be parallelised.
• Guide our tech estate to be internally consistent, being pragmatic about decisions that don’t align with the general technical direction and disciplined about bringing it back on track.

Collaboration towards commercial outcomes

• Have the knowledge, judgement, and understanding to work cross-functionally with your business and product partners to make decisions about the roadmap.
• Communicate technical ideas to a wide range of stakeholders, including more junior engineers, senior leadership including the CTO, and to colleagues in other parts of the business. You are able to pull out the key points relevant to the people you are communicating with.

• Provide advice and guidance on key technical areas.
• Understand key needs of your stakeholders in engineering, product and the wider business and be able to be flexible and pragmatic on how we meet those needs.
• Partner with Product, Delivery, and others to help frame and align engineering priorities so that we deliver rapid value to our customers. Work closely with Product, Delivery and others in order to identify where delays elsewhere impact work you've outlined, then clearly communicate and mitigate or communicate mitigations.
• Model consistency, integrity, reliability, and ease of interaction with engineering to the rest of the business

Technical strategy:

• Anticipate future technical needs and take ownership of proposing a course of action. This could be to do with risks to existing strategy, learnings from production or changes in the wider technical landscape.
• Understand the external landscape that Kooth engineering exists in. You must keep up with trends, great practice, competitor products/projects, etc.
• Understand the internal landscape of what we are building and the customer outcomes we deliver to support us in making the best technical decisions with the information we have.
• Work with engineering leadership peers to support the CTO in growing and driving the tech strategy. Own specific areas of the tech strategy yourself.

This is not an exhaustive list.

Requirements

Essential

• Deep knowledge of software architecture patterns
• Knowledge of best practices in software engineering
• Ability to work in a fast-moving environment and to design flexible technical solutions
• Strong security awareness, as required in a regulated environment
• Ability to collaborate across teams and department to achieve commercial outcomes
• Ability to coach and mentor
• Commercial outlook
• Bias to action and ability to foster a culture of pragmatic delivery alongside technical excellence
• Strong stakeholder management
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related, or equivalent work experience

Benefits

Are you looking for a fulfilling career with attractive perks and a supportive work environment? Look no further! We're excited to offer an incredible opportunity with a range of benefits that cater to your professional growth, well-being, and work-life balance.

1. Competitive Salary:

Up to £110,000 dependant on experience

2. Generous Annual Leave:

Enjoy 28 days of annual leave, in addition to public holidays, providing you ample time to recharge and spend quality moments with your loved ones.

3. Professional Development:

Benefit from our yearly professional training programmes, tailored to your career aspirations and designed to enhance your skills and knowledge.

4. Financial Security:

Secure your financial future with our pension contributions and annual company share option awards, giving you a stake in the success of the company.

5. Health and Well-being:

Prioritize your health and well-being with our comprehensive Health Shield cover and access to an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP). The EAP offers 24/7 telephone mental health support and access to GP consultations, ensuring your mental and physical health are taken care of.

6. Life Assurance:

Gain peace of mind knowing that you're covered with life assurance, providing up to four times your annual salary to your loved ones in the unfortunate event of your passing.

7. Flexible Working:

Embrace the flexibility of remote working, allowing you to create a work-life balance that suits your needs and maximizes your productivity.

8. Lifestyle Benefits:

If you're seeking a stimulating career where your well-being, growth, and contributions are valued, we invite you to apply and become a part of our dynamic and supportive team. Join us as we strive for success together!

At Kooth, we are committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace that values and embraces the unique contributions of every individual. We believe in equal opportunities for all, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression or sexual orientation.

Our dedication to creating a fair and unbiased environment is reflected in all aspects of our recruitment, hiring, and employment practices. We strive to provide a work environment that is free from discrimination, where every employee is treated with respect and dignity.

Request for Reasonable Adjustments:

We are dedicated to providing reasonable adjustments to applicants and employees with disabilities or individuals who require accommodations to participate in the application process, interviews, or job-related tasks. If you require any reasonable adjustments to ensure your equal participation in our recruitment process, please inform our Human Resources team.

Your openness will allow us to work together to provide appropriate accommodations and ensure a fair and accessible application and employment experience for everyone.

Kooth plc is committed to our responsibilities for safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, young people and vulnerable adults . We are committed to recruiting candidates who share this commitment to safeguarding, and therefore we apply robust recruitment and selection procedures to ensure that the people selected are right for the job, and that all candidates are appropriately screened prior to appointment. This will include a DBS check.