Principal Engineer - Member Experience Platform in Skipton

The Member Experience Platform (MEP) powers Skipton’s most visible digital channels, our Mobile App, Member Portal, and Customer Identity capabilities, used by over a million members to manage their financial lives. As Principal Engineer, you set the engineering tenets, patterns and paved roads that these channels (and the teams who build them) depend on every day. Your remit spans company‑level technical direction, delivery physics (Value‑Flow‑Quality), and bar‑raising across squads: you shorten lead times, increase deployment frequency, hold change‑failure rate low, and improve MTTR through release‑linked observability – turning fast, safe flow into the default way of working.

Operating at platform scale, you define cross‑cutting architecture and delivery standards (API/event contracts, resilience, observability, language/dependency baselines) and drive adoption through the Golden Path: policy‑as‑code CI/CD, progressive delivery (feature flags, canary/blue‑green), automated rollback/forward‑fix, ephemerally‑ready data‑ready environments, and guardrails that make security and compliance by design. You partner with Platform Ownership, DevSecOps, Environments, Release, and Quality Engineering to turn strategy into small, safe, frequent changes, so MEP ships world‑class, member‑centric experiences that feel simple, personal and human, every week.

You’ll also lead and manage a cohort of engineers within MEP – setting goals, raising the hiring bar, growing craft through coaching and feedback, and building a healthy, high‑performance culture in partnership with the Platform Owner.

What This Role Matters: The Member Experience Platform is where Skipton’s purpose becomes real for members, through the Mobile App, Member Portal and Identity journeys that people rely on to save, apply, manage and stay secure. As these journeys grow in sophistication and impact, the engineering system behind them must operate at a high‑performance, high‑reliability standard. This role matters because Skipton’s ability to deliver happier, healthier, stronger member outcomes depends on engineering physics, low lead times, high deployment frequency, low change‑failure rate and fast recovery. You own these physics: designing the tenets, guardrails and paved roads that engineers across MEP depend on to move quickly and safely.

Through Golden Path pipelines, policy‑as‑code, release‑linked observability, on‑demand environments and shift‑left quality you guide teams toward inventing for members while delivering digital experiences that feel simple, personal and human. You achieve engineering physics via people – developing Engineers, aligning squads on shared tenets, and creating a culture where psychological safety and high standards coexist. Your leadership turns fast, safe flow into a repeatable team habit, not a one‑off effort.

Benefits: Annual discretionary bonus scheme, 25 days annual leave + bank holidays, rising to 30 with service, Holiday trading scheme, Up to 10% employer pension contribution, Colleague mortgage (conditions apply), Hybrid & electric car salary sacrifice scheme, Private medical insurance, 3 paid volunteering days per year, Inclusive colleague networks (Carers, Pride Alliance, and more), Well‑being benefits including cycle‑to‑work and discounted gym membership, Strong commitment to training and development.

Responsibilities: As Principal Engineer for the Member Experience Platform, you will set the technical direction, engineering tenets and paved roads that shape how our Mobile App, Member Portal and Identity services are built, deployed and operated. You will operate with company‑wide influence – defining patterns, guardrails and architectural boundaries that enable teams to deliver small, safe, frequent changes with low lead times, high deployment frequency, low CFR and fast recovery baked in.

You will design and evolve the Golden Path for MEP: our secure‑by‑default, policy‑as‑code CI/CD pipelines; progressive delivery frameworks (feature flags, canary, blue‑green, automated rollback/forward‑fix); and on‑demand, ephemerally‑ready, data‑ready environments. You’ll define service blueprints, IaC modules, API/event patterns, dependency baselines and observability standards – ensuring they become the default way MEP ships value.

A critical focus of your role is Value–Flow–Quality (VFQ). You will help squads diagnose and remove constraints, redesign delivery flows, adopt trunk‑based development, tighten test automation, embed contract/performance/resilience/security testing inside CI, and build release‑linked observability that ties every deployment to metrics, logs, traces and golden signals. You will publish and act on flow signals (lead time, deployment frequency, CFR, MTTR) and help teams do the same – raising engineering maturity across the platform.

You will own the engineering strategy that enables the platform to evolve – driving a 1–3‑year modernisation roadmap covering decoupling, core refactoring, data strategy improvements, resilience uplift and technical debt retirement. You will collaborate with Architecture, DevSecOps, Environments, Release & Deployment and Quality Engineering to ensure platform‑wide consistency in design, operability, risk controls, compliance‑as‑code and secure‑by‑design foundations.

Finally, you will act as a multiplier of engineering excellence across Skipton – coaching Staff/Senior Engineers, leading Communities of Practice, shaping the hiring bar, authoring design/decision narratives, and representing Skipton in internal and external engineering forums. You raise the bar for clarity, craft, system thinking and decision quality, ensuring the Member Experience Platform delivers digital experiences that feel simple, secure and human for every member.

Qualifications / Requirements: Proven leadership in high‑performance delivery (VFQ excellence) – you have led engineering environments where lead time drops, deployment frequency rises and change‑failure rate stays low, using automation‑first pipelines, trunk‑based development, progressive delivery, release‑linked observability and data‑ready environments. Deep craft in modern, cloud‑native engineering – expertise in secure‑by‑design, cloud‑native architecture, distributed systems, API/event patterns, resilience engineering, IaC, policy‑as‑code CI/CD, observability, progressive delivery, testability and automated rollback/forward‑fix.

Ability to build the right thing – working backwards from members. You use journey data, telemetry and member insight to invent on their behalf, anchoring engineering decisions in measurable outcomes, not assumptions. A true technical multiplier with organisation‑wide influence – you raise the bar across squads and platforms, defining reusable templates, service blueprints and engineering patterns; mentoring, managing and leading Engineers; leading Communities of Practice; shaping the hiring bar; and improving decision quality through clear narratives and technical judgement.

A values‑led, evidence‑driven mindset – you role‑model “Be Accountable, Be Curious, Be Collaborative, Be Brave”, making decisions using scorecard signals, SLOs, error budgets and delivery metrics. You create psychological safety, celebrate safe/fast releases, advocate for continuous improvement and operate with the clarity, judgement and ownership expected of a Principal Engineer.

What You’ll Bring: You bring company‑wide technical influence, clear judgement, and a track record of setting the tenets, patterns and paved roads that hundreds of engineers can rely on – turning fast, safe flow into the default way of working across App, Portal and Identity. You demonstrate deep modern engineering craft – secure‑by‑design, cloud‑native architecture, APIs/events, resilience engineering, IaC and policy‑as‑code CI/CD – and are comfortable defining language/dependency baselines and architectural boundaries for other teams to adopt.

In people leadership you have a track record of managing engineers, building growth plans, giving clear feedback and running fair, evidence‑based performance processes. You set the hiring bar, calibrate levels, and build succession by developing Staff/Senior engineers into future leaders. You master delivery physics (VFQ) – proven ability to shorten lead time, increase deployment frequency, keep CFR low and improve MTTR, using trunk‑based development, progressive delivery, automated rollback/forward‑fix and release‑linked observability.

With observability & reliability built‑in you instrument for golden signals, traces and deployment annotations; define SLOs/error budgets; lead recovery drills and failure‑mode testing so reliability improves as speed increases. You standardise on‑demand, production‑like environments with data‑on‑demand (masked/synthetic/seeded), parity checks and drift detection, enabling teams to release small, safe changes with confidence.

You shape 1–3‑year engineering roadmaps that simplify and decouple systems, retire technical debt, uplift resilience and improve developer experience across MEP’s App, Portal and Identity surfaces. As a technical multiplier you coach Staff/Senior Engineers, lead communities of practice, publish reusable blueprints (pipelines, IaC modules, service templates), raise the hiring bar and improve decision quality through clear narratives. Member‑centred judgement means you work backwards from member outcomes and journey telemetry to invent on their behalf, ensuring MEP ships world‑class experiences across Mobile App, Member Portal and Identity that feel simple, personal and human.

You model the values of Accountability, Curiosity, Collaboration and Bravery – creating psychological safety, celebrating safe/fast releases and nurturing a culture of continuous improvement and craft excellence. You partner seamlessly with Platform Ownership, DevSecOps, Environments, Release, QE, Architecture, Risk and Audit – balancing speed with security, compliance‑as‑code and audit‑ready evidence.

Ready to Make an Impact? Join us and help build the next generation of digital solutions at Skipton. This is your chance to innovate, collaborate, and create technology that truly matters.