Principal Engineer, Opus 2
+ Loyalty Share Scheme
Legal software & services
Be an early applicant
Legal software & services
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
+ Loyalty Share Scheme
201-500 employees
Company mission
To design, develop, and deliver industry-leading solutions that transform the dispute lifecycle —empowering legal professionals to maximise the value they deliver to clients.
Role
Who you are
- Deep expertise in distributed systems, multi-tenant SaaS platforms, and API-first architectures
- Strong full-stack background with a focus on TypeScript; experience with Java and/or Go is highly desirable
- Proven experience designing and evolving systems on AWS, including serverless architectures; familiarity with Kubernetes
- Frontend and backend framework experience, including React and Spring
- Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams, not just within a single squad
- Excellent mentoring, coaching, and technical communication skills
- Strong understanding of scalability, performance, security, and operational reliability
- Typically 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including senior technical leadership roles
What the job involves
- As a Principal Engineer, you are a senior technical leader responsible for setting technical direction across multiple squads and shaping the long-term architecture of the platform
- You will work closely with Engineering, Product, and Design leadership to ensure Opus 2’s technology strategy supports business goals, scales with customer demand, and maintains the highest standards of quality, security, and reliability
- You will operate beyond a single squad, influencing engineering practices, architectural decisions, and delivery approaches across the organisation
- While you may lead the most complex initiatives hands-on, your primary impact comes from technical leadership, mentoring, and strategic guidance rather than day-to-day execution alone
- Define and evolve the technical vision and architecture across multiple product areas
- Lead the design and delivery of high-impact, cross-squad initiatives and platform-level capabilities
- Act as a trusted technical advisor to Engineering Managers, Staff Engineers, and
- Establish and promote engineering standards, patterns, and best practices across teams
- Identify systemic technical risks and proactively drive solutions before they impact delivery or customers
- Influence roadmap decisions by balancing business needs, technical constraints, and long-term platform health
- Champion modern engineering practices including CI/CD, observability, automated testing, and secure-by-design development
- Drive the effective and responsible use of AI across the SDLC to improve quality, delivery speed, and developer productivity
- Mentor and coach senior engineers and staff engineers, raising the overall technical bar of the organisation
- What success looks like
- Opus 2 has a clear, scalable, and resilient technical architecture aligned with business strategy
- Large, complex initiatives are delivered successfully across squads with minimal technical friction
- Engineering teams consistently make better architectural and design decisions due to your guidance
- Technical debt is actively managed and reduced through deliberate, visible strategy
- Senior engineers grow in confidence and capability through your mentorship and leadership
- Engineering standards and practices improve measurably across the organisation
Our take
Documentation, clients and teams are all multifarious in legal proceedings, and therefore provide unique logistical problems. Opus 2 aims to meet the needs of the modern courtroom by providing digital solutions in an age of remote hearings.
The company provides e-bundles that seek to solve these problems. Whilst courtrooms may use existing video software to conduct hearings, Opus 2 integrates this software with other elements (such as data storage and documentation) in order to streamline the process and ultimately save time for everyone. The company offers virtual workspaces on a secure cloud platform, streamlining legal work for both lawyers and clients.
Opus 2 continually invests in developing its software in the UK and internationally and facilitates this by hiring new talent. A recent partnership with SeeUnity is set to help achieve this.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
13% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company HQ
Holborn, London, UK
Leadership
Graham Smith-Bernal
(CEO)Founded LiveNote, the world's most widely used litigation support tool, before starting Opus 2 in 2008.
Salary benchmarks
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