Principal/Senior Software Engineer - Freelance/Contractor - Freelance

Context

Our client is building an AI Factory to help engineering teams across a major international airline group and its operating companies deliver software more effectively. The ambition spans the software development lifecycle: turning business intent and operational signals into clear requirements, technical decisions, implemented changes and verified releases. Shared tooling, organisational knowledge and governance will support adoption across different teams and technology environments.

Missions

• Own capabilities from problem to production. Work with product, architecture and engineering teams to clarify needs, challenge assumptions, define scope and acceptance criteria, and deliver useful increments with clear technical decisions.

• Build the factory and its developer toolkit. Design and maintain services, CLI tools, SDKs, agent harnesses, MCP servers and integrations with repositories, work tracking, CI/CD and enterprise systems.

• Engineer reliable agent workflows. Combine deterministic orchestration with LLM capabilities, defining tool boundaries, structured contracts, state handoffs, evaluations, recovery behaviour and human review where required.

• Connect the wider delivery lifecycle. Build workflows for requirements, architecture decisions, implementation, testing and release. Make Group, operating company and project knowledge available to agents with appropriate access controls and traceability.

• Integrate governance into delivery. Work with Cyber, QA, Infrastructure, Architecture and Change teams to automate checks and evidence collection. Implement approval workflows that preserve clear decision ownership and escalation paths.

• Provide hands-on technical leadership. Own design decisions and difficult implementation work, review code, mentor engineers and establish reusable patterns. Help teams resolve trade-offs and move forward without relying on formal authority.

• Work directly with adopting teams. Run discovery sessions, pair with engineers and demonstrate working software. Turn feedback into improvements, support rollout and give teams the documentation and knowledge to operate independently.

• Measure and improve outcomes. Establish baselines for delivery lead time, approval wait time, reliability and cost. Use production feedback and reproducible evaluations to guide platform improvements and technology choices.

Tools & Environment

• AWS, Model Context Protocol (MCP) and modern developer tooling

• TypeScript, Python, Go or Rust for backend services, developer tools or platform capabilities

• Distributed systems, API design and integration failure modes

• LLM applications and agent workflows including tool calling, context management and evaluation

• IAM, serverless or container workloads, event-driven systems and observability

• CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure as code and secure software delivery

• Integrations with tools such as GitHub, GitLab, Jira and ServiceNow

Working Conditions

• Location: TBC

• Contract type: Contractor/Freelance

• Role level: Principal/Senior Software Engineer

• Focus on delivery across large or regulated organisations, multiple business units or complex enterprise toolchains, including collaboration with security, architecture and change approval functions

Success in the First Two Months

• Understand the pilot teams and agree a prioritised delivery problem, measurable baseline and achievable scope with the relevant stakeholders.

• Ship a working capability used by a pilot team, with tests, security controls, observability and documentation appropriate to its release stage.

• Demonstrate a workflow across tools and team boundaries, such as preparing change evidence or supporting a security review, with explicit verification and approval responsibilities.

• Use pilot feedback and measured results to improve the implementation, document reusable patterns and help other engineers adopt them.