Principal Software Engineer

About us

PhysicsX is a deep-tech company with roots in numerical physics and Formula One, dedicated to accelerating hardware innovation at the speed of software.

We are building an AI-driven simulation software stack for engineering and manufacturing across advanced industries. By enabling high-fidelity, multi-physics simulation through AI inference across the entire engineering lifecycle, PhysicsX unlocks new levels of optimization and automation in design, manufacturing, and operations — empowering engineers to push the boundaries of possibility.

Our customers include leading innovators in Aerospace & Defense, Materials, Energy, Semiconductors, and Automotive.

The Role

The Principal Software Engineer role at PhysicsX is an individual contributor role with leadership and collaboration expectations. The Principal is expected to be an effective technical thought-partner to non-technical stakeholders, and is expected to contribute strongly to an environment of growth and development in the craft of software engineering across the organisation.

The AI Workbench product group develops and maintains the modelling, optimisation, and inference components of the PhysicsX platform, creating efficient environments for model development and deployment by our ML Engineer and Data Scientist users. It works closely with our Research group to integrate new research into our modelling libraries and applications.

What you will do

• Engage with the product managers, designers, and users of AI Workbench to fully understand the
  what
  and
  why
  of the product's functional requirements.
• Partner with the product leadership of AI Workbench to define the art of the possible with ambitious pragmatism, defining the
  how
  and
  when
  of product development.
• Take responsibility and accountability for the implementation of components and services by a team of software engineers and data-scientists, and actively participate in development by contributing to source-code, documentation, and CI/CD workflows.
• Design and maintain services that are fully interoperable with PhysicsX's other platform services, while remaining independently versioned, tested, and deployed.
• Implement standardised instrumentation for metrics, logs, and traces and take responsibility for the teams' prompt remediation of issues in production.
• Establish performance benchmarking to measure compliance with non-functional requirements, right-size infrastructure requests, and provide appropriate SLAs.
• Participate in establishing company-wide software engineering standards through engagement with the software engineering guild.
• Participate in the growth and development of software engineers.
• Participate in the recruitment and onboarding of software engineers.

What you bring to the table

• A passion for the evolving craft of software engineering and for sponsoring a culture of excellence in the craft.
• A proven ability to act as an effective technical thought-partner to non-technical stakeholders.
• A proven ability to lead teams of software engineers in a fast paced and iterative environment, through active participation in problem solving, coaching, and architectural decision-making.
• A solid track-record of designing, building, and maintaining application services in distributed architectures.
• Strong experience deploying applications on Kubernetes, leading to a high level of independence in writing IaC (Helm, Terraform, Crossplane) and CI/CD workflows (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD), and a focus on designing applications that leverage native Kubernetes resources over CSP managed services.
• Experience with workflow orchestration, event-driven systems, and messaging (NATS, ArgoWorkflows).
• Proficiency in Python and a system language (Rust, C/C++).
• An understanding of the interactions between high level machine learning frameworks (PyTorch) and the low-level accelerators (C/C++, bust most importantly CUDA/GPUs)
• Strong familiarity with overall Data Science and Machine Learning concepts (e.g. bias and variance, optimisers used in training neural networks, etc) and the machine learning development lifecycle.

Ideally

• Experience with the Kubeflow ecosystem.
• Proficiency in Go.
• Some proficiency in TypeScript and React, as well as an understanding of frontend architecture patterns.

What we offer

• Equity options – share in our success and growth.
• 10% employer pension contribution – invest in your future.
• Free office lunches – great food to fuel your workdays.
• Flexible working – balance your work and life in a way that works for you.
• Hybrid setup – enjoy our new Shoreditch office while keeping remote flexibility.
• Enhanced parental leave – support for life's biggest milestones.
• Private healthcare – comprehensive coverage
• Personal development – access learning and training to help you grow.
• Work from anywhere – extend your remote setup to enjoy the sun or reconnect with loved ones.

We value diversity and are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of sex, race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, disability, age, sexual orientation or gender identity. We strongly encourage individuals from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech to apply. To help make a change, we sponsor bright women from disadvantaged backgrounds through their university degrees in science and mathematics.

We collect diversity and inclusion data solely for the purpose of monitoring the effectiveness of our equal opportunities policies and ensuring compliance with UK employment and equality legislation. This information is confidential, used only in aggregate form, and will not influence the outcome of your application.