Principle Developer

Group Technology

Principal Developer

Full-time · Stockport office every Thursday; remote the rest of the week · Salary dependent on experience

Naturecan Group is a fast-growing, multi-entity health and wellness business operating across e-commerce, regulated pharmacy, and clinical healthcare. We run operations across the UK, Germany, and beyond — brands include Naturecan (D2C, ~50 Shopify stores), Mycannabis and Nowomed (German medical cannabis pharmacy), WMG Pharma (wholesale pharmaceutical distribution), and Dose (our CQC-registered UK medical cannabis clinic, in development).

Group net sales continue to group across Naturecan Core, MedCan pharmacy, WMG wholesale, and Dose all scaling simultaneously. The technology team sits at the heart of that growth: we build and maintain the platforms that underpin every entity in the group.

This is a group-level principal technical role. You will report directly to the IT Director with a remit that spans infrastructure ownership, cross-team technical collaboration, and the ability to float across streams and pick up whatever is most critical at any given point.

The nature of the role is breadth and depth in equal measure. One day you may be deep in a server performance issue for the MedCan WordPress estate; the next you are reviewing Dose’s payment gateway architecture or driving the security remediation programme. Context switching at pace — without losing technical rigour — is fundamental to how this role operates.

In practice, the role has two dimensions:

1. Technical ownership. — owning the group’s infrastructure, security governance, DNS, AI strategy, and platform-level decisions that require principal-level experience. This includes driving improvements to internal tooling and communications infrastructure — ensuring the business operates on the right foundations as it scales.

2. Cross-team technical collaboration. — supporting the Engineering Manager and delivery teams as a senior technical resource — available to dig into hard architectural or infrastructure problems and provide technical continuity across delivery streams when needed.

At the outset this is an individual contributor role with no people reporting line — influence through technical depth and judgement rather than hierarchy. That said, this role is not rigidly defined. We are looking for the right person first, and if that person brings people leadership as an additional strength, there is a natural opportunity for the role to evolve in that direction as the team grows. What matters most is exceptional technical ability and the drive to use it.

As an e-commerce and healthcare business, our platforms run 24/7. Occasionally that means responding to something outside of normal hours — this is part of the role and expected on those rare occasions when it’s needed. We are flexible in return: if you’ve been working late resolving a critical issue, you are not expected to be online first thing the following morning. The goal of this role is also to put the right guardrails in place so that those situations become increasingly rare.

Infrastructure & Security

• Own all DNS and domain management across the Naturecan group — a senior-only responsibility with significant business risk
• Lead the security audit remediation programme — driving findings from third-party security partners through to resolution
• Endpoint management and device security — Windows EOL, device encryption, endpoint tooling configuration, and Active Directory governance
• GCP and cloud infrastructure governance — security posture, access controls, cost management
• Oversee infrastructure migration for MedCan and related legacy server decommission
• Drive the migration of internal business communications onto modern, structured tooling — reducing reliance on informal channels and building an infrastructure that scales with the business
• Ongoing IT decisions that require senior judgement — device lifecycle, authorisation decisions, tooling governance across the group

MedCan — Platform Stability & Active Workstreams

• Work with the engineering team to formalise a clear stability plan for Mycannabis 360 and Mycannabis Wuppertal — addressing current performance constraints and ensuring the platform remains stable as clinic volumes and data grow
• Assess the right path forward for the MedCan WordPress estate: near-term improvements, plugin and database maintenance, monitoring and alerting — with migration to Dose as the longer-term destination
• Own the ongoing WordPress maintenance cadence: plugin security and rewrites, DB cleansing (every 3–6 months as order data grows), uptime monitoring improvements
• Teleclinic onboarding — technical oversight of the Clinics API and new integrations as MedCan scales its prescriber network
• Payment gateway integrations across the MedCan estate — future providers; implementation oversight and security review

Dose — Technical Oversight

• Payment gateway integration — senior technical oversight and review, working closely with the Dose team and Engineering Manager
• Architecture review on complex Dose decisions — regulatory data handling, CQC compliance, patient data security
• DevOps support for the Dose platform — CI/CD, environment management, deployment pipeline stability
• Cross-platform technical decisions, particularly where the Nowomed-to-Dose migration path intersects with MedCan infrastructure

AI Automation & Developer Productivity

• Support the Engineering Manager’s AI automation programme — contributing technically to the meeting-to-Jira pipeline, communications-to-ticket dashboard, and RAG systems across Jira, Confluence, and codebases
• Drive AI code completion and tooling adoption across both engineering teams — building shared workflow standards at scale
• Own the technical strategy for Claude Enterprise, API consumption governance, and MCP integration across the group
• Identify and ship AI-driven improvements that reduce manual overhead in sprint planning, incident response, and onboarding

Engineering Standards

• Set and maintain code review standards and engineering quality bar across Dose and MedCan teams
• A senior technical resource for the Engineering Manager and delivery teams — available to dig into the hard problems and bring them to resolution
• Technical mentoring for the Dose Engineering Lead and senior developers across both streams
• Developer productivity tooling — sprint analytics, Jira workflow improvements, shared tooling standards

We’re looking for someone with most of the following — you don’t need to tick every box:

Technical depth

• 8+ years of professional software development, with strong backend and systems-level experience
• Comfortable across a mixed stack: WordPress/PHP (MedCan estate), TypeScript/Bun.js (Dose). Node.js experience is directly transferable.
• Deep understanding of security architecture — authentication, authorisation, DNS/email security (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), endpoint management, access controls
• Infrastructure experience: cloud (GCP, AWS), VPS/dedicated server management, migrations, and infrastructure-as-code approaches
• Payment gateway integration experience — PSPs, webhooks, idempotency, and secure handling of payment flows in regulated contexts
• RESTful API design and review — able to audit, improv