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Salary: EUR 80,000 - 120,000 / annual
GoCardless is a global bank payment company processing US$130bn+ annually across 30+ countries. The company enables over 100,000 businesses to collect, manage, and send bank payments through Direct Debit, real-time payments, and open banking, with AI-powered solutions for payment success and fraud reduction.
This is a new Principal Software Engineer role based in Lisbon, created to strengthen technical leadership within the Global Growth group. You will own the architecture of the dashboard platform and design system used across the company, bringing technical depth to de-risk the highest-impact initiatives. You'll act as a technical multiplier for engineers across multiple teams while remaining hands-on enough to lead the hardest problems yourself. You'll report into engineering leadership for Global Growth and work alongside engineering managers and other Principal Engineers across the company.
The role requires proactive leadership—identifying problems, developing options, and driving solutions without waiting to be asked. You'll have real authority and mandate for technical decisions across multiple teams, with the ability to escalate blocking issues effectively. You must think in systems, understanding interdependencies and making architectural decisions that balance immediate needs with long-term flexibility. You'll communicate using metrics and data to support recommendations and present technical strategies to executives and senior stakeholders.
You should have a full-stack engineering background with deep front-end architecture experience and strong, hands-on back-end expertise. A track record of operating as a senior technical leader across multiple teams—setting direction, mentoring engineers, and earning trust from both engineers and senior stakeholders—is essential. Strong communication skills are critical; you must explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders as easily as to other engineers.
GoCardless uses Ruby on Rails, Golang, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Postgres, BigQuery, Kubernetes, Elasticsearch, Prometheus, and Google Cloud (GCP). The engineering culture emphasizes contributing to open-source projects, sharing learnings through post-mortems and conferences, and building simple, reliable systems.
