2703 Principal Engineer Contract Outside Ir35 jobs near me

Job Information

• Date Opened 25/08/2026
• Job Type Contract
• Industry IT Services
• Work Experience 5+ years
• Salary £400 - £425 Outside IR35
• City London
• Province Greater London
• Country United Kingdom
• Postal Code E14

Job Description

About Scrumconnect Consulting

Scrumconnect Consulting is a multi-award-winning digital consultancy, recognised for delivering impactful technology solutions across UK government departments. Our work has positively influenced the lives of over 40 million UK citizens.

With a strong commitment to user-centred design and agile delivery, we continue to build innovative digital services that truly make a difference.

Role Purpose

We are looking for an experienced Backend Developer to design, build, and maintain scalable, secure server-side services and APIs, while contributing to the adoption of Agentic AI capabilities within our engineering platform. The role sits at SFIA Level 4: the individual works under general direction, uses discretion in resolving problems, plans and monitors their own work (and may guide junior colleagues informally), and understands how their work contributes to broader team and organisational objectives.

Key Responsibilities

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  Design, develop, test, and maintain backend services and REST/GraphQL APIs using Java/Spring Boot (or equivalent modern backend stack).

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  Contribute to system architecture and data model design in collaboration with senior/lead engineers.

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  Write clean, well-tested, maintainable code following TDD/BDD practices and team coding standards.

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  Participate in code reviews, providing and receiving constructive feedback.

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  Integrate backend services with databases (relational and NoSQL), messaging/event systems, and third-party APIs.

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  Build, extend, and operate agentic AI workflows — integrating LLM-based agents and tools into backend systems for automation, orchestration, and decision support.

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  Support CI/CD pipelines, containerised deployments, and cloud infrastructure (AWS/Azure) for services owned by the team.

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  Diagnose and resolve production issues, contributing to monitoring, logging, and observability practices.

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  Document technical designs, APIs, and agent workflows clearly for other engineers and stakeholders.

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  Work closely with QA, DevOps, and product teams within an Agile/Scrum delivery model.

Technical Skills

Core Backend

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  Languages: Java 11/17/21 (or later), with working knowledge of Kotlin/Scala a plus

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  Frameworks: Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Security, Hibernate/JPA

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  APIs: REST, GraphQL, OpenAPI/Swagger

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  Databases: PostgreSQL, Oracle, MongoDB, Elasticsearch

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  Messaging/Streaming: Kafka, RabbitMQ, event-driven architecture

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  Testing: JUnit, Mockito, TDD/BDD, Cucumber

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  Build & CI/CD: Maven/Gradle, Git, Jenkins/GitHub Actions/GitLab CI

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  Cloud & Containers: AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda, EKS, RDS, IAM) or Azure, Docker, Kubernetes

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  Monitoring: Grafana, Prometheus

Agentic AI Skills (Required/Desirable)

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  Understanding of LLM agent architectures: reasoning loops, tool-use, planning, and memory patterns.

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  Hands-on experience (or strong aptitude to learn) building or integrating agents using frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

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  Ability to design and expose backend services as tools/functions callable by AI agents (tool schemas, function calling, structured outputs).

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  Experience with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector), embeddings, and chunking strategies.

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  Working knowledge of prompt engineering and evaluation techniques for agent reliability, safety, and cost control.

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  Familiarity with orchestrating multi-agent workflows and human-in-the-loop approval steps for sensitive actions.

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  Awareness of security, data-privacy, and governance considerations specific to AI agents (prompt injection risks, access scoping, audit logging).

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  Experience integrating with LLM provider APIs (e.g., Anthropic Claude API, OpenAI API) including streaming responses and tool-result handling.

Qualifications & Experience

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  Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent demonstrable experience.

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  10-15 years' commercial backend development experience.

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  Proven experience delivering production-grade services in Agile/Scrum teams.

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  Exposure to (or strong interest in) integrating AI/LLM capabilities into production systems.

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  Good communication skills; comfortable explaining technical trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

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  SC Clearance/Eligibility required
  
  

Diversity & Inclusion

At Scrumconnect Consulting, we believe that diversity drives innovation. We are committed to creating an inclusive environment where every individual is respected, valued, and supported.

We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds and experiences, and we actively encourage applications from women, people with disabilities, under-represented communities, and those seeking flexible working arrangements.