Job overview

Principal Systems Engineers provide technical leadership and are responsible for the operation and running of national, highly available distributed systems being built and run within NHS England.

These systems can differ in size, scale and purpose, but an example system would:

Have a round-the-clock requirement to be available to a level of 99.9% or higher

Have a national-scale impact on unavailability, and cope with the load associated with a daily transactional user-base of more than one hundred thousand people

Adopt modern Cloud best-practices and open standards to support interoperability and re-usability

Achieve high availability through operational simplicity.

Provide flexible low-cost horizontal scale out to handle expected and unexpected variations in load.

Handle the architectural trade-offs necessary to avoid logical bottlenecks

Provide security controls appropriate for the storage of large volumes of sensitive data - hundreds of millions of records and documents.

Have a direct clinical impact on patient care.

These national critical systems enable safe, reliable identification across health and care, supporting services used by hundreds of thousands of people every day.

Main duties of the job

As a Principal Systems Engineer, you will focus on:

hands-on engineering and technical leadership for national, highly available distributed systems being built and run within NHS England, driving up the engineering maturity for those systems
leading and contributing to broader engineering improvement initiatives across the directorate / organisation, and the ongoing refinement of the NHS England engineering principles.

You will also:

• represent System Engineering practice at a senior level within your business area, providing strong, decisive and visible technical leadership.
• act as an initial point of escalation for key technical issues, providing leadership, autonomy, support and direction.
• support Lead and Senior Systems Engineers to ensure every product or service has a clear technical vision with objectives aligned to the real needs of users and the mission of the organisation.
• ensure that relevant key stakeholders and delivery partners are included, work with them is well coordinated and that new partnership opportunities are evaluated.
• form part of a multi-functional leadership team to deliver user driven outcomes.

On-call

Participation in a shared on-call rota may be required to support a 24/7/365 service, this rota covers evenings, weekends, and public holidays. Successful candidates may need to meet the requirements for Security Check (SC) clearance to access live systems and sensitive data.

Working for our organisation

NHS England has a wide range of statutory functions, responsibilities and regulatory powers. These are focused on supporting the wider NHS to deliver high quality care, as well as doing those things that are best done once for the whole NHS.

Our staff bring expertise across clinical, operational, commissioning, technology, data science, cyber security, software engineering, education, and commercial specialisms — enabling us to design and deliver high-quality NHS services.

In March 2025, the Government announced that NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care will increasingly merge functions, ultimately leading to NHS England being fully integrated into the department. 

If you currently work within the NHS and if successful at interview, we will initiate an Inter Authority Transfer (IAT) via the Electronic Staff Record (ESR). This retrieves key data from your current or previous NHS employer to support onboarding, including competency status, Continuous Service Dates (CSD), and annual leave entitlement. You may opt out at any stage of the process.

Colleagues with a contractual office base are expected to spend, on average, at least 40% of their time working in our offices.

Staff recruited from outside the NHS will usually be appointed at the bottom of the pay band.

We cannot offer visa sponsorship for any vacancies.