Software Engineer, (Principal level)

Voice AI Space; Remote; GBP 160,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading AI technology firm in the UK is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to drive backend initiatives and lead engineering efforts across teams. The ideal candidate should have at least 10 years of experience in software engineering, with proven leadership capabilities and a track record in SaaS development. This full-time remote role offers a competitive salary starting at £160,000 along with stock options and generous leave policies.

Benefits

Stock option plan

25 days of leave

Flexible remote work environment

Qualifications

• At least 10 years of experience as a software engineer, with 2+ years at Senior Staff/Principal level.
• Proven leadership experience in managing projects across multiple teams.
• Expertise in backend development and SaaS product environments.

Responsibilities

• Direct engineering initiatives for process improvement.
• Lead backend projects and ensure overall stability of engineering functions.
• Strategically plan for future engineering challenges.

Skills

Software engineering

Leadership

Cross-team project management

Backend development

SaaS product development

Commercial alignment

Job description

Welcome to the video first world

From your everyday PowerPoint presentations to Hollywood movies, AI will transform the way we create and consume content. Today, people want to watch and listen, not read — both at home and at work. If you’re reading this and nodding, check out our brand video.

Despite the clear preference for video, communication and knowledge sharing in the business environment are still dominated by text, largely because high‑quality video production remains complex and challenging to scale—until now….

Meet Synthesia

We’re on amission to make video easy for everyone. Born in an AI lab, our AI video communications platform simplifies the entire video production process, making it easy for everyone, regardless of skill level, to create, collaborate, and share high‑quality videos. Whether it’s for delivering essential training to employees and customers or marketing products and services, Synthesia enables large organizations to communicate and share knowledge through video quickly and efficiently. We’re trusted by leading brands such as Heineken, Zoom, Xerox, McDonald’s and more. Read stories from happy customers and what 1,200+ people say on G2.

In February 2024, G2 named us as the fastest growing company in the world. Today, we’re at a $2.1bn valuation and we recently raised our Series D. This brings our total funding to over $330M from top‑tier investors, including Accel, Nvidia, Kleiner Perkins, Google and top founders and operators including Stripe, Datadog, Miro, Webflow, and Facebook. Pleas read the latest updates in our Synthesia 3.0 release.

What you’ll do at Synthesia:

• You will focus on friction points around primarily backend issues for all teams in Engineering (80 Engineers). How should we do inter‑service testing? Some teams are using monorepo, others aren’t. How can we bring overall stability up? Generally steering BE in the right direction. In the near future, standardising things across all of Engineering and bringing R&D teams (another 40 Engineers and Researchers) closer.
• You will have ownership of projects that span quarters, requiring you to have the ability to break a problem down into small steps that can be delivered and validated iteratively.
• You will evaluate your own work, leveraging our data pipeline and frameworks that we have established to understand the impact your features have on our commercial objectives and pivoting where necessary.
• You will consider the long‑term direction of Engineering, making sure that we are developing the engineering capabilities that will allow us to stay ahead of the challenges we are likely to encounter in 12‑18 months' time.
• You will work end‑to‑end, from our client application written in React to our monolithic backend written in Python, and lead projects that span across multiple teams.

What we’re looking for:

• At least ten (10) years of experience as a software engineer, at least 2 at the Senior Staff/Principal level (L7+).
• Previous leadership experience in driving projects across multiple teams (50+ Engineers).
• Experience in a high‑performing engineering Org that is operating at scale. This could come from a scale‑up environment or a more established organization recognised for building and shipping with a great engineering culture.
• An ability to work across the stack, with deep knowledge on server side and all things backend related.
• Relevant engineering experience for a team building an enterprise‑grade SaaS product. Extra points for delivering AI‑powered video generation product, billing systems, experimentation platforms, video delivery systems, online editors, real‑time collaboration and so on.
• Strong alignment with commercial success.

Why join us?

We’re living the golden age of AI. The next decade will yield the next iconic companies, and we dare to say we have what it takes to become one. Here’s why,

Our culture

At Synthesia we’re passionate about building, not talking, planning or politicising. We strive to hire the smartest, kindest and most unrelenting people and let them do their best work without distractions. Our work principles serve as our charter for how we make decisions, give feedback and structure our work to empower everyone to go as fast as possible. You can find out more about these principles here.

Serving 50,000+ customers (and 50% of the Fortune 500)

We’re trusted by leading brands such as Heineken, Zoom, Xerox, McDonald’s and more. Read stories from happy customers and what 1,200+ people say on G2.

Proprietary AI technology

Since 2017, we’ve been pioneering advancements in Generative AI. Our AI technology is built in‑house, by a team of world‑class AI researchers and engineers. Learn more about our AI Research Lab and the team behind.

AI Safety, Ethics and Security

AI safety, ethics, and security are fundamental to our mission. While the full scope of Artificial Intelligence’s impact on our society is still unfolding, our position is clear: People first. Always. Learn more about our commitments to AI Ethics, Safety & Security.

Other important info:

• This is a remote role from an EU country, UK or Switzerland.
• The salary starts at EUR/GBP/CHF 160,000 base + stock option plan.
• This is full‑time employment only - no contractors possible - usually through OysterHR.
• Everyone at Synthesia gets 25 days of leave + local holidays (no extra paid or unpaid leave possible).
• We only sponsor VISA if you are in the UK/EU country already and need support - we do not relocate people.