<h2><strong>The Role</strong></h2> <p>The Growth Mega Alliance (GMA) builds the platforms that power how HelloFresh acquires, converts, and retains customers across 18 markets and multiple brands, across five pillars: AdTech, Conversions, Payments, Communications, and Customer Value Optimization (CVO).</p> <p>As Principal Engineer, you are the technical visionary for these platforms. You define architectural direction across all five pillars, lead the most consequential cross-cutting initiatives, and raise the technical bar for the entire organization. This is a hands-on leadership role - you code, review, and design alongside the senior and staff engineers who look to you as the technical lead.</p> <h2><strong>What You'll Do</strong></h2> <h3><strong>GenAI & Agentic Engineering Leadership</strong></h3> <ul> <li>Own GMA's GenAI strategy: identify the highest-leverage opportunities across all five pillars where AI/ML unlocks step-change outcomes, for both engineering productivity and customer-facing capabilities.</li> <li>Establish agentic development workflows — where specs drive AI-assisted code generation — and scale them from early adopters to standard practice. Build the guardrails and reference architectures that enable squads to work AI-natively.</li> <li>Develop and articulate a clear point of view on how engineering teams need to evolve in skills, process, and culture to realize the gains that agentic tools make possible.</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Growth Platform Architecture</strong></h3> <ul> <li>Own the long-term technical architecture across GMA's five pillars: real-time personalization, experimentation at scale, AI/ML-driven automation, and cross-pillar data integrity.</li> <li>Lead the most complex architectural decisions (shared identity schemas, experiment assignment, AdTech-to-Conversions signal loops, payment authorization flows) and drive migrations with large impact.</li> <li>Ensure GMA platforms integrate cleanly with internal infrastructure and meet reliability, latency, and observability requirements at a global scale. </li> </ul> <h3><strong>Experimentation & Personalization</strong></h3> <ul> <li>Define GMA's experimentation strategy and execution framework to optimize experimentation-based decision-making at scale.</li> <li>Own the data path from customer event to business decision: instrumentation standards, identity resolution, attribution windows, and signal quality.</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Technical Strategy & Cross-Alliance Collaboration</strong></h3> <ul> <li>Define GMA's multi-year technical vision and communicate it with the precision engineers need and the clarity executives can act on. Represent GMA in company-wide programs.</li> <li>Partner with Intelligent Platforms, Consumer, and Operations Mega Alliances to drive shared architectural standards and prevent fragmentation.</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Mentorship & Engineering Culture</strong></h3> <ul> <li>Coach and grow Staff and Senior Engineers across all five pillars. Foster engineering excellence through rigorous design review, strong observability practice, and honest post-incident learning.</li> <li>Champion AI-native development workflows, TDD, DDD, and DevSecOps. Set the written communication standard through your design docs and architectural decision records.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>What You'll Bring</strong></h2> <h3><strong>GenAI & Agentic Engineering</strong></h3> <ul> <li>Practical, hands-on experience with AI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode) in production or near-production environments — not just experimentation.</li> <li>Experience integrating GenAI into customer-facing products or internal business processes at scale, with a clear point of view on the team and cultural changes required to realize the productivity gains.</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Growth Domain Expertise</strong></h3> <ul> <li>Deep familiarity with at least two of: AdTech / paid media infrastructure, funnel optimization, payment orchestration, CRM and lifecycle communications, or pricing and incentive optimization.</li> <li>Fluent in growth domain constraints: PSP behavior, consent and privacy requirements across markets, deliverability limits, attribution windows, and incrementality measurement. Experience in a multi-market subscription or e-commerce business preferred.</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Technical Depth</strong></h3> <ul> <li>~10+ years in software engineering, with ~5+ years at principal level in a high-growth, cloud-native environment.</li> <li>Expert in distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven patterns (Kafka). Deep AWS experience. Strong proficiency in Go, Kotlin, Python, or TypeScript.</li> <li>Track record of designing and operating large-scale, multi-region systems. Comfortable doing hands-on architectural reviews and solving critical bottlenecks directly.</li> <li>Working knowledge of experimentation design and analysis; able to work directly with data (SQL, BI tooling) and trace the full signal chain from instrumentation to business metric.</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Ways of Working</strong></h3> <ul> <li>Exceptional written communication — your documents make complexity smaller, not larger.</li> <li>Able to influence without authority; direct, low-ego, and comfortable disagreeing with senio