Start: ASAP

Duration: 6 months

Location: Hybrid setup from Stockholm (consultant must be based in Stockholm)

Mission and Purpose

The Principal Engineer is our client's most senior individual contributor role and the highest technical authority in engineering. The role operates across all of our client's engineering, reports to the VP Engineering, and is accountable for the coherence and long-term viability of our client's technical landscape as a whole.

Where a Staff Engineer owns technical direction for a product or functional area, the Principal Engineer owns the enterprise architecture and the technical strategy that spans every area - the systems, boundaries, and standards that determine whether our client can keep moving fast at ten times the current scale.

The role comes with company-wide mandate. A Principal Engineer is expected to set direction, define the architectural rules of the road, and intervene wherever our client's technical future is being decided - in close partnership with the VP Engineering, Engineering Managers, Staff Engineers, Product leadership, and the executive team.

Scope and Impact

The Principal Engineer influences engineering, product, and business strategy at the company level. Key areas of impact:

· Owning our client's long-term technical direction and enterprise architecture

· Setting the architectural principles and standards every functional area builds within

· Translating business strategy into technical strategy - and making the reverse case when technical reality should reshape business ambition

· Maintaining a rolling 6-24 month view of the architecture our client will need, and closing the gap to it before the business hits it

· Making the small number of decisions that are expensive or impossible to reverse

Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architectural knowledge is the core of this role. The Principal Engineer holds the whole picture - every domain, platform, integration, and data flow across our client - and uses it to make decisions no one closer to a single team can make:

· Owning the target architecture for our client end to end: domain boundaries, system ownership, data flows, integration patterns, and the platform layer beneath them

· Defining how our client's systems evolve toward that target - sequencing, migration paths, and what gets decommissioned

· Governing the build/buy/partner decisions with structural consequences

· Setting standards for reliability, observability, security, data governance, and cost at the architectural level, so they are properties of the system rather than the discipline of individual teams

Business Alignment and Forward Architecture

Architecture at our client is only useful if it arrives before the business needs it. The Principal Engineer stays close enough to commercial and product strategy to know what our client will be trying to do in 6 to 24 months, and makes sure the architecture is ready when it gets there:

· Maintaining a rolling 6-24 month architectural outlook - what our client's systems need to look like at that horizon, and the honest delta from today

· Partnering with Product, Commercial, and executive leadership to turn roadmap ambition, market expansion plans, and new business models into concrete architectural requirements

· Sequencing enabling and platform work so capability lands ahead of the commercial commitment that depends on it, not in response to it

Leading the Agentic Transition

Our client is moving toward a fully agentic engineering model. Agents write, test, review, and deploy code. Engineers set direction, define quality, and make judgment calls. The Principal Engineer owns the architecture that makes this safe and scalable across all of our client's engineering - and the strategy for getting there.

Technical Leadership and Mastery

Industry-leading authority across multiple technical domains, with the breadth to reason about all of them at once. The role stays hands-on where it matters most:

· Contributing directly to the highest-leverage technical work - architecture, critical system design, prototypes that prove or kill an approach, and the agentic platform itself

· Setting the standard for technical judgment: making trade-offs explicit, quantifying risk, and being clear about what our client is choosing not to do

· Framing architecture and technical debt in terms of business value, optionality, and cost of change, at a level the executive team can act on

· Leading the decisions and reviews that shape our client's technical landscape - architectural principles, design reviews, technical strategy documents, and RFCs

· Resolving the disagreements between areas that cannot be resolved locally

Mentorship and Support

The most trusted technical sparring partner in the company, and a developer of leaders rather than only of engineers. Mentors and coaches Staff Engineers, Engineering Managers, Product Managers, and senior leadership. Through active listening, facilitation, and clear communication, they strengthen other people's decision-making - and grow the next generation of engineers who can direct, evaluate, and be accountable for agents.

What This Role Is Not

· Not a manager - no direct reports, no people management responsibility

· Not formally responsible or ultimately accountable for individual projects, features, or team delivery

· Not expected to be involved in delivery details in any area

· Not a purely architectural or advisory role - the mandate is to decide and to build, not only to review