Principal Engineer

Grip is the AI-powered, end-to-end event platform built for engagement. The flexible system helps commercial event organizers like Ascential, Hyve, Emerald and Clarion Events boost revenue by establishing, maintaining and tracking relationships between participants over multiple events. This is possible because Grip goes beyond networking. It combines AI with billions of interactions happening across the platform with a powerful event management system, seamless registration and award-winning mobile event app so participants meet the right people at the right time.

We're hiring a Principal Software Engineer into our Grip Engage team, where our engineers are building a best-in-class event registration platform, dealing with complex configurations and integrations, handling payments, feeding our data pipelines and insights, and working on exciting on-site technologies like smart badges and location telemetry.

This is a senior individual contributor role that operates across two dimensions: deep product ownership within the Engage squad, and a wider platform remit working alongside our Head of Platform and VP of Engineering to shape how we build and run infrastructure across the organisation.

We are highly invested in your growth. Your career development is a standing agenda item in regular check-ins with your manager. As a Principal Engineer at Grip, you'll have real influence over technical direction platform-wide, opportunities to mentor across squads, and a clear progression framework. We use quarterly performance reviews to reflect on progress and set ambitious goals aligned with your aspirations.

1. Screening call

2. Product/engineering case study — a problem statement and requirements, working together to understand how you'd approach implementation

3. Technical assessment — system design and technical interview focused on data architecture, pipelines, and platform trade-offs

4. Final round with our Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer — culture fit and alignment on vision
   

We want a product-minded principal engineer who will:

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  Take ownership of features from start to finish using agile methodologies, delivering with feature flags, tests and observability

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  Work with our product team to refine plans and identify issues and opportunities

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  Deliver features with security and performance in mind

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  Champion high-quality communications including technical proposals and specifications, testing reporting, release planning and more

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  Be happy working across the tech stack

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  Contribute to the technical direction for the squad - driving architectural consistency, code quality, and engineering best practice

Beyond squad-level product work, you will take an active role in the health and evolution of Grip's wider platform:

• Work closely with our Head of Platform and VP of Engineer Operations on our AWS infrastructure (EKS, ECS, Lambda, CloudFront, S3).

• Design and improve CI/CD pipelines, progressive delivery, and automated rollback workflows  and help standardise these practices across squads

• Drive reliability monitoring and tighten how incidents are caught and resolved early

• Extend our observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Sentry) and ensure meaningful coverage across services

• Own security posture improvements across the platform: vulnerability scanning, pen testing coordination, and enforcement of standards

• Contribute to cross-platform architectural standards, shared libraries, and internal tooling decisions

• Identify and lead progressive modernisation of legacy systems — migrating and consolidating without disrupting delivery