Principal Engineer, Resilience Engineering

Position Summary

We are seeking an accomplished technology leader to spearhead a critical initiative in Resilience Engineering. There are limitations of current component and infrastructure reliability strategy. This role will drive a fundamental shift in approach, moving from a presumption of reliability to an expectation of failure to drive resilience patterns in both technology and human processes.

You will lead the effort to institutionalize modern techniques redundancy, graceful degradation, monitoring, chaos engineering, adaptation, preparedness, and modularity.  This is to treat resilience as a systemic challenge, not just a technology problem. This position requires a leader who can not only architect and implement technical solutions but also foster the necessary cultural change across engineering, infrastructure, and cybersecurity teams. You will act as a skilled facilitator and principal engineer, guiding teams to build assurances of failure tolerance into the daily operation of our most critical payment systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and Facilitate: Guide cross-functional teams through a multi-phase program to enhance systemic resilience. Foster a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility for the end-to-end payments flow.
• System Discovery and Mapping: Initially direct the exploration and documentation of our complex, multi-layered payments applications to develop techniques for broad technology discovery and mapping. Leverage experience simplifying legacy technology stacks to map all component interactions, dependencies, potential failure modes.
• Instrumentation and Observability: Architect a comprehensive instrumentation strategy to make the entire system observable.  This will leverage current work to build and enhance the Observe platform. Apply your expertise in enhancing system stability and performance Open Telemetry to ensure all dependencies are empirically validated and changes can be detected and analyzed.
• Controlled Experimentation: Design and oversee a program of controlled experiments to validate failure mode assumptions. Lead teams in injecting faults into lower environments to gather evidence needed for architectural adjustments and optimize systemic resilience.
• Production Chaos Engineering: Drawing on a strong empirical basis, develop and implement a strategy for safely introducing deliberate faults into the production environment (e.g., restarting services, degrading network connectivity) to continuously validate resilience.
• Institutionalize Best Practices: Drive the institutionalization of a "design for failure" mindset. Develop and evangelize new patterns, tools, and processes that make resilient failure a core part of our system design and engineering culture.

Qualifications and Skills

• Leadership Experience: Significant experience leading technology initiatives in a demanding financial environment, with a proven ability to manage and influence large teams.
• Technical Expertise: Deep expertise in technologies used for high-volume financial transactions. Experience scaling infrastructure capacity to handle billions of daily transactions.
• System Modernization: Demonstrated success in modernizing and simplifying complex technology stacks, including decommissioning legacy components to improve efficiency, maintainability, discoverability, and risk reduction.
• Financial & Regulatory Systems: Extensive experience with core finance technology, including accounting, payments, settlements, client data, and the implementation of technology for a regulated business.
• Problem-Solving: A proven ability to tackle complex technical challenges, architect innovative solutions, and consolidate disparate systems into unified, efficient platforms.
• Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, necessary for facilitating cross-functional teams and driving cultural change across the enterprise.

Purpose of the role

To drive technical excellence and innovation by leading the design and implementation of robust software solutions, providing mentorship to engineering teams, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and contributing to strategic planning to ensure the delivery of high-quality solutions aligned with business objectives. 

Accountabilities

• Provision of guidance and expertise to engineering teams to ensure alignment with best practices and foster a culture of technical excellence.
• Contribution to strategic planning by aligning technical decisions with business goals, anticipating future technology trends, and providing insights to optimize product roadmaps.
• Design and implementation of complex, scalable, and maintainable software solutions, considering long-term viability and business objectives.
• Mentoring and coaching to junior and mid-level engineers to foster professional growth and knowledge sharing, elevating the overall skillset and capabilities of the organization.
• Collaboration with business partners, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions and ensure a cohesive approach to product development.
• Innovation within the organization by identifying and incorporating new technologies, methodologies, and industry practices into the engineering process.

Director Expectations

• To manage a business function, providing significant input to function wide strategic initiatives. Contribute to and influence policy and procedures for the function and plan, manage and consult on multiple complex and critical strategic projects, which may be business wide..
• They manage the direction of a large team or sub-function, leading other people managers and embedding a performance culture aligned to the values of the business. Or for an individual contributor, they lead organisation wide projects and act as deep technical expert and thought leader, identifying new ways of working and collaborating cross functionally. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
• Provide expert advice to senior functional management and committees to influence decisions made outside of own function, offering significant input to function wide strategic initiatives.
• Manage, coordinate and enable resourcing, budgeting and policy creation for a significant sub-function.
• Escalates breaches of policies / procedure appropriately.
• Foster and guide compliance, ensure regulations are observed that relevant processes in place to facilitate adherence.
• Focus on the external environment, regulators, or advocacy groups to both monitor and influence on behalf of Barclays, when appropriate.
• Demonstrate extensive knowledge of how the function integrates with the business division / Group to achieve the overall business objectives.
• Maintain broad and comprehensive knowledge of industry theories and practices within own discipline alongside up-to-date relevant sector / functional knowledge, and insight into external market developments / initiatives.
• Use interpretative thinking and advanced analytical skills to solve problems and design solutions in often complex/ sensitive situations.
• Exercise management authority to make significant decisions and certain strategic decisions or recommendations within own area.
• Negotiate with and influence stakeholders at a senior level both internally and externally.
• Act as principal contact point for key clients and counterparts in other functions/ businesses divisions.
• Mandated as a spokesperson for the function and business division.

All Senior Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.