UK

United Kingdom · Technical roles · Senior (5-8 years)

Senior Principal Engineer

Here is the whole job, in plain words. What it is, a real day, what you decide, how you're judged, how people get here and where they go next. Then the part no course gives you: twelve AI tutors who learn your work.

  • Experience bandSenior (5-8 years)
  • Direct reportsNo direct reports
  • Reports toPrincipal Engineer Manager
  • UK framework levelUsually a professional owning their own work, or leading a small team

Also advertised as Senior Staff Engineer · Lead Software Architect · Principal Software Developer

Built on an analysis of 43,079 real UK job descriptions · grounded in qualifications employers recognise

Start with a free Future Fluency check, tuned to Senior Principal Engineer

Ten quick questions, one per Future Fluency, asked against this role rather than a generic one. About five minutes, and no card.

Start the check, free

1What this role really is

As a Senior Principal Engineer, you'll be the technical backbone for a significant chunk of our platform. This isn't just about writing code; it's about owning the technical health, design, and future direction of entire services. You'll be the go-to person for complex technical challenges within your domain, guiding junior engineers and making sure our systems are robust and scalable. Think of it as being the chief architect for a crucial part of our digital world, making sure it works brilliantly and stays ahead of the game.

2What you'd actually use

The tools this job runs on, and how well you'd need to know each one.

AWS (Lambda, ECS/EKS, DynamoDB, SQS, IAM)Advanced

Designing and implementing solutions using serverless functions, container orchestration, NoSQL databases, message queues, and managing access control for critical services.

TerraformAdvanced

Creating complex, reusable Infrastructure-as-Code modules, managing state effectively, and implementing CI/CD for infrastructure changes across multiple environments.

KubernetesAdvanced

Deploying and managing applications using Helm charts, debugging pods and services, and understanding networking (CNI) and storage (CSI) concepts for highly available systems.

Datadog (or Prometheus/Grafana)Advanced

Creating complex dashboards and SLO-based monitors, implementing custom metrics and distributed tracing across services to ensure proactive monitoring and reliability.

GitHub ActionsAdvanced

Designing and building complete CI/CD pipelines from scratch, implementing security scanning (SAST/DAST) and quality gates to ensure robust software delivery.

Miro/Lucidchart (or C4 Model)Advanced

Creating detailed system and sequence diagrams to communicate designs for new features or services, ensuring clarity and alignment across teams.

Go/Python/JavaExpert in at least one, Advanced in another

Deep expertise in one or more languages for writing clean, testable, and performant code, understanding performance tuning, concurrency patterns, and language-specific idioms.

3What you get to decide, and how that grows

Power in a job isn't your title. It's what you're allowed to decide. Here's how it grows as you move up.

The choiceComing inWhere you are nowThe step above
Technical Design for a New ServiceFollows existing patterns, seeks explicit approval for all design choices.Proposes designs based on established patterns, seeks review from senior engineers.Designs complex services independently, documents with ADRs, consults with Principal Engineer Manager on strategic implications.
Tool/Technology Selection for a WorkstreamUses approved tools only, escalates any deviation.Suggests tools from a pre-approved list, requires manager approval.Evaluates new technologies, proposes and justifies selections based on technical merit and business fit, with manager consultation for significant cost/risk.
Incident Response & ResolutionFollows runbooks, escalates immediately if unsure.Diagnoses and resolves common incidents independently, escalates complex issues.Leads incident response for critical service outages, makes real-time technical decisions to restore service, drives post-mortem and preventative actions.
Mentorship & GuidanceAsks questions, seeks guidance from senior team members.Provides informal advice to new joiners, reviews basic code.Formally mentors 0-2 junior engineers, provides in-depth code reviews, helps unblock complex technical challenges, guides career development conversations.

4How you'll be judged

The scoreboard, honestly: the hard targets, how often each one is actually looked at, and the quiet human signals that never make it onto a dashboard.

System Uptime/Availability
The percentage of time your owned services are fully operational and accessible to users.
Target · 99.95% (or better) for core services

If your service had 30 minutes of downtime in a month, that's a 99.93% availability, just below our target. You'd be expected to lead the investigation and fix.

Lead Time for Changes
The average time it takes for a code change to go from commit to production deployment for your owned services.
Target · Less than 24 hours

If the average time from a developer pushing code to it being live is 26 hours, you'd be looking at ways to streamline testing, deployment, or review processes to get it under 24 hours.

Mentee Progression
The number of junior engineers you've formally mentored who've been promoted to the next level.
Target · At least 1 mentee promoted within 18 months

You've been mentoring Sarah for 15 months, and she's just been promoted to Software Engineer. That's a clear win for your leadership and coaching.

Technical Leadership & Influence
How effectively you guide technical direction, influence design choices, and are sought out for your expertise by other teams.
  • You're regularly invited to early-stage project discussions, your architectural proposals are adopted by multiple teams, other senior engineers ask for your input before making big decisions, and you lead technical discussions in team meetings.
Architectural Quality & Maintainability
The robustness, scalability, and clarity of the designs you create and the systems you oversee.
  • Your designs rarely lead to unexpected production issues, new features can be added with minimal friction, technical debt in your owned services is actively managed and reduced, and your documentation (ADRs, diagrams) is clear and up-to-date.
Proactive Problem Solving
Your ability to identify and address potential issues before they become critical problems.
  • You're often the first to spot a looming performance bottleneck or a security vulnerability, you propose solutions before being asked, and you lead initiatives to improve system resilience or developer experience without direct instruction.

5Would you like it

The honest version. What people enjoy, and what grinds them down.

What people enjoy
Solving Gnarly Technical Problems

You'll spend a good chunk of your week wrestling with complex system interactions, debugging elusive performance issues, or figuring out how to scale a service by 10x. It's a constant puzzle.

Spending three days deep-diving into distributed tracing logs to find the root cause of an intermittent database connection issue that's been plaguing a critical service for weeks.

Building and Seeing Your Designs in Action

You'll design a new service, architect its components, and then work with teams to get it built and deployed. There's a real satisfaction in seeing your vision come to life and actually work.

Leading the design for a new message queuing system, then seeing it successfully process millions of events per day without a hitch, directly supporting a new product launch.

Mentoring and Growing Other Engineers

You'll regularly do code reviews for senior engineers, pair program on tricky problems, and offer advice on career paths. You get a kick out of helping others level up.

Guiding a senior engineer through their first large-scale system design, helping them think through failure modes and scalability challenges, leading to a much stronger proposal.

What frustrates people
  • The 'Architectural Review Board' that's more of a rubber stamp meeting, where you're forced to present complex designs to people who don't have the context to provide meaningful feedback.
  • Fighting organisational inertia when you know a better way to build something, but you're blocked by risk aversion or 'that's too much change'.
  • Spending ages explaining non-functional requirements—like why you need to spend two sprints on improving observability or security—to business stakeholders who just want the next shiny feature.
  • Being the 'tie-breaker' on every technical debate, getting pulled into endless meetings to settle disputes between senior engineers, which eats into your strategic work time.
What this role does not give you
  • A clear, direct team of reports to manage (though you'll mentor plenty).
  • The ability to unilaterally dictate technical decisions without building consensus.
  • A predictable, unchanging technical landscape; expect constant evolution and new challenges.
  • A 'hands-off' approach to production issues; you're expected to be deeply involved in incident response for your owned systems.

6Who you work with

This role directly influences the stability, performance, and long-term maintainability of our core technical services. Your decisions here can prevent major outages, speed up feature delivery, and significantly reduce operational costs. You'll be setting the technical bar for your domain, which, frankly, is a big deal for the entire engineering organisation.

Inside the business
  • Principal Engineer Manager
  • Product Leads
  • Operations Team
  • Security Team
  • Other Senior Engineers
Outside the business
  • Key Vendors (e.g., cloud providers)
  • Integration Partners
  • Occasionally, senior clients for technical deep-dives

7What you need before you start

Not a wish list. The things you would be expected to already have.

  • Proven experience as a Senior Software Engineer (L3) or equivalent, having owned the technical roadmap and health of at least one significant service.
  • Demonstrable experience leading the design and implementation of complex features from end-to-end, not just individual tasks.
  • A strong track record of mentoring junior engineers and contributing to their technical growth.
  • Experience with incident response and leading efforts to diagnose and resolve critical production issues.
  • Proficiency in at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and a solid understanding of cloud-native patterns.
  • A genuine passion for building robust, scalable systems and a continuous drive to learn and improve.

8What to practise next

Where the job is going, and what to do about it starting this week.

Platform Engineering & Developer Experience

As our organisation grows, the friction for developers to build and deploy increases. Senior Principal Engineers will increasingly focus on building internal platforms and tools that make other engineers more productive, reducing cognitive load and accelerating delivery.

Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) · Standardised deployment pipelines · Observability as a Service

  • This month: Identify one significant pain point in our current developer workflow.
  • Month 2: Research existing IDP solutions or internal platform patterns.
  • Month 3: Propose a small-scale internal tool or automation to address that pain point.

Quick win: Automate a repetitive manual task that you or your team currently perform weekly.

Secure Software Supply Chain Management

With increasing cyber threats and regulatory scrutiny, ensuring the security of our entire software supply chain—from code commit to deployment—is paramount. You'll need to understand and implement advanced security practices.

SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) · Vulnerability scanning (SAST/DAST/SCA) · Code signing and integrity verification

  • This month: Review our current security scanning tools and identify gaps.
  • Month 2: Research best practices for secure software supply chains (e.g., SLSA framework).
  • Month 3: Propose improvements to our CI/CD pipelines to enhance supply chain security.

Quick win: Ensure all new dependencies are automatically scanned for known vulnerabilities upon introduction.

9Staying current once you are in

What people here do to keep up
  • Regularly contribute to open-source projects or maintain a technical blog to share your expertise.
  • Attend and speak at industry conferences (e.g., KubeCon, AWS re:Invent, QCon) to stay current and build your network.
  • Participate in online courses or bootcamps focused on emerging technologies like AI/ML engineering, advanced security, or new distributed system patterns.
  • Engage in internal 'guilds' or communities of practice to share knowledge and drive technical standards.

10How the AI economy is changing work like this

Before we ask anything of you, here's what we can already say about AI and work of this kind:

The new skill this role is being asked for: Prompt Engineering & LLM Integration

Honestly, competitors are already using large language models (LLMs) like GPT and Claude to draft reports in 10 minutes that used to take 2 hours. Engineers who figure this out will outproduce their peers by a factor of 3:1. It's not future-state; it's happening now.

We'll only ever tell you what we can actually back up. No hype, no scare tactics.

Your PlanIllustration

Built for Senior Principal Engineer

3 units that map to this job, from the qualifications that cover it.

  1. Developing low level engineering softwareExcellence, Achievement & Learning Limited · covers 1 of 2 standardsLevel 4
  2. Lead the work of teams and individuals to enhance performance 3City and Guilds of London Institute · covers 1 of 2 standardsLevel 4
  3. Performing Low Level Programming for Engineering SoftwareETC Awards Limited · covers 1 of 2 standardsLevel 3
These are the real units behind this job, in the order they rank for it. Nothing here is marked done, because this plan has not been started by anyone yet. Yours would fill in as you go.

The rising capability

Zavmo analysis

What's rising in its place

This is where the work is heading, and the higher pay with it. Get fluent here and the shift stops being a threat and starts being your edge.

Prompt Engineering & LLM Integration

Honestly, competitors are already using large language models (LLMs) like GPT and Claude to draft reports in 10 minutes that used to take 2 hours. Engineers who figure this out will outproduce their peers by a factor of 3:1. It's not future-state; it's happening now.

  • Context windows and token limits
  • Temperature settings for different tasks
  • RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) architectures
  • Output validation and hallucination detection
  • Prompt chaining for complex analysis

Advanced Cloud Cost Optimisation (Deep FinOps)

Cloud bills are only getting bigger, and simply 'turning things off' isn't enough. We need engineers who can architect for cost-efficiency from the ground up, making strategic choices that save millions. This isn't just a finance problem; it's an engineering problem.

  • Unit economics of cloud services
  • Reserved Instances and Savings Plans strategy
  • Serverless vs. Container cost models
  • Data transfer cost optimisation
  • Automated cost anomaly detection

What you’ll use

Skills this role draws on

Technical

  • Distributed Systems Design
  • Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Principles
  • Threat Modeling (STRIDE/DREAD)
  • Architectural Decision Records (ADRs)
  • Cloud FinOps

The pathway

How you actually get there, here

How you become one varies far more by country than what one does. This is the UK route. Most people take one of these ways in; the right one depends on where you're starting from.

  1. 1

    From Senior Software Engineer (L3)

    2-4 years at the Senior level

    Skills to master

    • Deepen your understanding of distributed systems, take ownership of cross-team technical initiatives, consistently mentor junior engineers, and proactively identify and solve architectural challenges.

    You're ready to move on when

    • You're the 'go-to' person for complex technical problems within your team's domain.
    • You consistently propose well-reasoned architectural improvements that get adopted.
    • You've successfully led the technical delivery of at least two major features or services from start to finish.
    • Junior engineers actively seek your advice and guidance, and you enjoy providing it.
  2. 2

    From Specialist Engineer (e.g., SRE, DevOps, Security)

    5-8 years of specialist experience, with 2-3 years at a senior level

    Skills to master

    • Broaden your software development skills beyond your specialism, learn to design full-stack systems, and develop strong cross-functional communication and influence to bridge your specialism with general engineering.

    You're ready to move on when

    • You've automated significant parts of your specialist domain, freeing up time for broader impact.
    • You regularly collaborate with core engineering teams, influencing their designs from your specialist perspective.
    • You've built tools or systems that are used by multiple engineering teams.
    • You demonstrate a strong understanding of software architecture beyond your immediate area.

11Where this role leads

The long view:Your journey here as a Senior Principal Engineer is just one step. We're committed to providing pathways for continuous growth, whether you want to become the deepest technical expert, a broad architectural visionary, or even transition into leadership. The future is yours to build.

Pay & demand

Pay and demand for this role will appear here, each figure traced to a named authoritative source (e.g. the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, under the Open Government Licence). We don’t show numbers we can’t attribute.

The ten Future Fluencies

Zavmo analysis

The credential is what you can do today. These are what keep you valuable.

A qualification proves you can do the job as it's defined today. These ten are what decide whether you're still the obvious person for it in five years. They're the capabilities employers are now writing into senior roles faster than people are learning them. Zavmo weaves them through whatever you study, so you come out with both: the credential and the fluency.

The highlighted ones are the Fluencies your role leans on hardest, from how Senior Principal Engineer is actually changing. In about two minutes, the free confidence check asks where you stand on each of the ten. That's the whole check, and it's what makes the plan yours rather than generic.

Where it leads

Roles this leads to

The record names a next step, but the catalogue has no page for it yet:

  • To Staff Engineer (L4)

12The team that's yours

No two people are taught the same way. This is one-to-one, not one-to-many.

Zavmo is a hyper-personalised AI learning platform. Twelve virtual tutors, each with a different way of teaching, and one orchestration agent that picks the right one for the moment. So every single lesson is shaped around you, your role, and the way you learn. Not a course everyone sits through. A conversation built for you, and no one else.

…and nine more, matched to you after your first chat. Meet all twelve

Start free and meet yours

13What it feels like

A conversation, not a course

Because your tutor knows your role, your projects and your last session, learning sounds like this. And it's different for every single person:

Developing low level engineering softwareLevel 4

Applied to your work in Senior Principal Engineer

The objective of this unit is to enable learners to interpret requirements, design, develop, test, and document low level engineering software components, ensuring functionality and adherence to coding standards.

How the thinking builds
  1. Remember
  2. Understand
  3. Apply
  4. Analyse
  5. Evaluate
  6. Create
An illustration of a Zavmo lesson, built from this role’s own route. The unit, its objective and every criterion above are the awarding body’s own words, not an example.

One to one, not one to many

No two people run this the same way

A course is written once and handed to everyone. This is assembled around you, and keeps changing as it learns you. Five things it reads, and what each one changes.

  1. Your actual work Every lesson is taught against a live piece of your own work, not a worked example from a textbook.
  2. What you already know The first conversation finds your starting point, so you skip what you can already do and spend the time on what you cannot.
  3. The conditions you learn under Not a learning-styles quiz. The evidence does not support those. The dimensions the research does back, read once and used to shape the plan.
  4. How far you got last time It picks up mid-thought. The tutor knows what you said, what you struggled with, and what it asked you to try.
  5. Which tutor suits the moment Twelve of them, each for a different kind of thinking. The one who walks you through a first idea is not the one who stress-tests it.

See how you learn, free. Eight questions, no sign-up. A directional taster; the diagnostic inside Zavmo goes deeper and keeps adapting.

DemonstrateIllustration

Evidenced on your work in Senior Principal Engineer

You do not finish by watching something. You finish by showing it on the work you already do, against the measures this job is judged on.

  • System Uptime/AvailabilityThe percentage of time your owned services are fully operational and accessible to users.If your service had 30 minutes of downtime in a month, that's a 99.93% availability, just below our target. You'd be expected to lead the investigation and fix.99.95% (or better) for core services
  • Lead Time for ChangesThe average time it takes for a code change to go from commit to production deployment for your owned services.If the average time from a developer pushing code to it being live is 26 hours, you'd be looking at ways to streamline testing, deployment, or review processes to get it under 24 hours.Less than 24 hours
  • Mentee ProgressionThe number of junior engineers you've formally mentored who've been promoted to the next level.You've been mentoring Sarah for 15 months, and she's just been promoted to Software Engineer. That's a clear win for your leadership and coaching.At least 1 mentee promoted within 18 months
These are this job's own measures, with its own targets. Nothing is marked evidenced, because nobody has started this yet. Yours would fill in from the work you bring.

Your passport

This isn't a certificate you file away. It's a passport to the life you're designing.

Every credit you earn and every fluency you build adds up: evidence where it counts, carried with you. Zavmo keeps the map: where you are, where you're heading, and the next step, at your pace, around your life. From Senior Principal Engineer to To Staff Engineer (L4), and whatever you decide comes after.

Level 4 · in progressAI Fluency→ To Staff Engineer (L4)→ your design
Where this takes you

Your journey here as a Senior Principal Engineer is just one step. We're committed to providing pathways for continuous growth, whether you want to become the deepest technical expert, a broad architectural visionary, or even transition into leadership. The future is yours to build.

See Your Progress GrowIllustration
Senior Principal Engineer
  • Distributed Systems Design
  • Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Principles
  • Threat Modeling (STRIDE/DREAD)
  • Architectural Decision Records (ADRs)
  • Cloud FinOps
This is your Mind Palace on learn.zavmo.ai. Every skill above comes from this role's own record, not an example borrowed from another job. A node lights up when you evidence it, and what you build stays yours between jobs. That is the part a course cannot do.

14The detail, folded away

Everything else the record holds

The career branches in full, how AI is already showing up in the day-to-day, and the questions people ask about this job. Here when you want them, out of the way while you decide.

Where it leads next, rung by rung

Where it leads

The career path, and where it branches

Senior Principal Engineer is a start, not a ceiling. Each step below asks for new skills and hands back more autonomy.

  1. To Staff Engineer (L4)

    3-5 years as a Senior Principal Engineer

    This is a natural progression, moving from owning a service/workstream to architecting solutions that span multiple services within a single team's domain. You'll start to shape the technical direction for a broader functional area.

    • Architecting solutions that involve complex integrations between multiple services.
    • Leading efforts to define and enforce technical standards across a team's domain.
    • Driving significant improvements in developer velocity or system reliability for a group of services.
Working with AI on the job

Working with AI

Where AI is starting to help

Let's be real, as a Senior Principal Engineer, your time is precious. You're juggling complex designs, mentoring, and firefighting. What if you could offload some of the grunt work and focus more on the strategic, high-impact stuff? Good news: AI can help, a lot.

We're not talking about replacing you; we're talking about giving you a seriously powerful co-pilot. Imagine cutting down on tedious boilerplate, getting faster insights from mountains of data, and drafting complex documents in a fraction of the time. That's the reality of AI in our technical roles today.

IaC & Boilerplate Generation

Use AI assistants like GitHub Copilot or Codeium to instantly generate boilerplate Terraform modules, Kubernetes YAML manifests, or initial API skeletons. Stop writing the same YAML or Go struct over and over; let the AI handle the repetitive stuff so you can focus on the unique logic.

Anomaly Detection Analysis

Feed terabytes of observability data—logs, metrics, traces—into an AI tool. It'll identify subtle performance degradation patterns or anomalous correlations that a human might miss. Catch issues *before* they cause an outage, rather than reacting to them.

RFC & Tech Doc Drafting

Got a complex architectural proposal? Provide an AI with your bulleted requirements, constraints, and proposed solutions. It can generate a surprisingly good first draft of a formal Architecture Decision Record (ADR) or a detailed technical design document, saving you hours of staring at a blank page.

Cross-Domain Knowledge Synthesis

Imagine asking a private, internal AI model (trained on our codebase and documentation) complex questions like, 'Which other services interact with the billing API's V2 checkout endpoint, and what are their dependencies?' Get instant answers to understand system dependencies without digging through hundreds of files.

Common questions

Common questions

How do you become a Senior Principal Engineer?

Common routes in include From Senior Software Engineer (L3) (2-4 years at the Senior level) and From Specialist Engineer (e.g., SRE, DevOps, Security) (5-8 years of specialist experience, with 2-3 years at a senior level). Times vary with prior experience.

Where can a Senior Principal Engineer progress to?

This role can lead on to To Staff Engineer (L4) (3-5 years as a Senior Principal Engineer), depending on the skills you build.

What level is a Senior Principal Engineer in the UK?

This role aligns to RQF Level 4 on the UK framework, a guide to the depth of qualification it maps to, not a hard entry bar.

What new skills matter most for a Senior Principal Engineer?

Increasingly, Prompt Engineering & LLM Integration and Advanced Cloud Cost Optimisation (Deep FinOps). These are the areas where the higher-paid, future-proof work is heading.

The honest bit

You’ve started things before

Most of them were built for a room full of people who aren’t you. A cohort moves on whether or not your week allowed it, and by the third week the thing you’re behind on becomes the reason you stop opening it.

There’s no cohort here, and no timetable to fall behind. Before anything starts, Zavmo asks when you’re sharpest and how long you can realistically sit down for, then builds the sessions around those answers. A bad fortnight changes your pace. It doesn’t put you behind.

And you only pay once you start learning. Searching and planning are free, and you can cancel any time — so the cost of finding out is an afternoon, not a year.

What it costs

Less than one coaching session. Every month.

A single career-coaching hour costs more than a month of this, and it ends when the hour does. Zavmo doesn't. It's £70 a month, about £2.30 a day, for a companion that knows a Senior Principal Engineer, works on the job you actually do, and keeps going at your pace rather than a timetable's.

  • Searching and planning stay free. You only pay when you start learning.
  • Your credits are yours. Regulated, and they don't vanish when a subscription ends.
  • Cancel any time and billing stops. No notice period, no minimum term.

Your path, personalised

You have the map. Walking it is the part we do together.

This route runs to 2 national skill standards. That is a real journey.

Zavmo shapes a learning experience as unique as you are. It fits how you learn, your pace and the work you already do. Every step stays benchmarked to recognised national standards. That’s the plan for becoming a Senior Principal Engineer: personal to you, and it still counts. The first steps are free.

Independent research finds well-designed intelligent tutoring performs nearly as well as one-to-one human tutoring: VanLehn (2011), Educational Psychologist.

A private tutor in the UK averages £35–40 an hour . Zavmo is £70/month.

A real plan on learn.zavmo.ai: Ofqual-regulated units, credits, and a three-month run at your own pace.
Start free No commitment. See your first steps free.

15Where to go from here

Other roles at Level 4

Same depth of qualification, different job. Useful if the work appeals but this particular role does not.

Other roles in Technical roles

Stay in the field you know and move sideways rather than up.

If you leave this industry

The skills you'll gain here—deep cloud architecture, distributed systems design, SRE, and technical leadership—are highly transferable across various tech sectors, from FinTech to e-commerce, or even to consulting roles where you'd advise other companies on their technical strategy.

Not sure this is the right direction?

Work out what you actually want from work first, then come back and see which roles fit it. Takes about ten minutes.

This role profile is © 2026Growth Engineering Technologies Ltd. Built from UK occupational standards and regulated qualification data, and written for Zavmo.

You're not behind. You're right on time. The shift is only just beginning. Your role won't look the same in two years. Be the one who leads the change, not the one it happens to. Build my plan, free Here's the first ten minutes: a 2-minute confidence check → your personalised roadmap → meet the tutors matched to you. No card, cancel any time. No card. Build your plan, see your roadmap and meet the twelve tutors matched to you. All free. When you're ready to start learning, it's £70 a month, billed monthly. Cancel any time and billing stops.