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Principal Software Engineer - Innovation Studio

About Product & Technology at Priority:

Our vision in Product & Technology is to engineer the world's most resilient, AI-native financial ecosystem that empowers businesses to transcend table‑stakes and lead the agentic future, where every financial transaction is intelligent, every developer is accelerated, and every experience is unified.

At Priority, we are building the Priority Commerce Engine, a unified platform that enables businesses to collect money, store money, lend money, move money, and build up-to-date commerce experiences at scale.

About the Role:

This role is focused on defining and driving the long-term technical direction across three core areas: customer‑facing AI innovation, AI‑driven risk and fraud, and AI‑enabled operational efficiency.

You will shape how AI-powered capabilities are designed, built, and scaled across the platform, guiding teams in moving from rapid prototyping to durable, production‑grade systems that deliver meaningful customer value. This includes establishing architectural patterns and best practices that enable consistent development of AI-driven features across products. You will also define the technical strategy for AI-driven risk and fraud systems, ensuring solutions are robust, adaptable, and aligned with evolving threat landscapes. In parallel, you will lead the adoption of AI‑enabled tools and workflows across the organization, driving improvements in developer productivity, product development processes, and broader business operations.





Principal Software Engineers are the senior technical leaders of a product area at Priority — a group of teams that together own a meaningful slice of the platform. You're the highest technical authority within the area, and accountable for both its technical outcomes and the continuous improvement of its engineering quality. Together with the area's Director of Engineering, you share accountability for the area's customer and business outcomes — the OKRs and KPIs the business plans on, what the area ships, and how reliably it serves customers.

You're motivated to own mission‑critical systems — the ones where correctness, data integrity, security, and availability are obligations, not features, and where a defect in production affects real customers moving real money. The weight of that responsibility is part of what draws you to this role, not something you tolerate.

You're hands‑on. Still. At Priority, the Principal title doesn't graduate you out of the code — it puts you in the parts of the system that matter most, and keeps you close to production so your direction stays grounded in reality. You lead by example — your quality, your work ethic, your AI‑native practice, and your engineering judgment set what the area looks like at its best.

What You’ll Do:

Stay hands‑on — design, build, review, and operate the parts of the area's systems that matter most; lead by example, not by exhortation.





Lead during the area's highest‑pressure moments — incidents that reach executive attention, senior cross‑functional escalations, the most critical delivery moments — regardless of time of day, day of week, or weekend.

Own the area's architecture roadmap and the ADRs that govern it — current, communicated, and built against by teams.

Participate in Priority's Architecture Review Board (ARB) — bring workstream architectural decisions that cross workstream boundaries or need enterprise ratification, and take ARB direction back to your teams; write ADRs to the enterprise standard and hold the ADR practice in your workstream so architecture knowledge compounds rather than scatters.

Show up as an active member of the Principal Engineering & Architecture Guild — the venue where Priority's Principals get sharper together.

Hold the architecture transparency framework in your workstream — every critical system has a current runbook, an AI‑native knowledge store, an ownership map, and a backup/shadow ownership map, machine‑readable and kept current; treat the AI‑native knowledge store as a real operating capability, not a side documentation exercise.

Set the workstream's observability bar — instrumentation, telemetry, SLOs, and error budgets engineered in from the first line of code; every team in the workstream builds in the spirit of SRE.

Define and drive how AI agents take part across discovery, design, development, testing, deployment, and operations — and be the most AI‑forward engineer in the area by visible evidence.

Own the area's OKRs and KPIs end to end — system metrics and the customer and business outcomes the area is on the hook for — and partner with product, design, and customer‑facing le

📌 Principal Software Engineer (London)
🏢 Priority Technology Holdings
📍 London