Principal Engineer - Member Experience Platform

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, ephemeral, 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.

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 is where the Principal Engineer becomes pivotal. You ensure that the platform’s architectural patterns, delivery practices and technical decisions make it possible to ship small, safe, frequent improvements that continually raise the quality, speed and reliability of member‑facing experiences.

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. The Principal Engineer owns these physics: designing the tenets, guardrails and paved roads that engineers across MEP depend on to move quickly and safely. You make the right path the easy path, through Golden Path pipelines, policy‑as‑code, release-linked observability, on‑demand environments and shift‑left quality, so teams can focus on what matters most: inventing on behalf of members and delivering digital experiences that feel simple, personal and human.

Crucially, you’ll achieve these delivery physics through people, developing Engineers, aligning squads on the same tenets, and creating a culture where psychological safety and high standards co‑exist. Your leadership turns fast, safe flow into a repeatable team habit, not a one‑off effort.

Skipton is committed to flexibility, balance, and wellbeing. Alongside hybrid working and a newly refurbished, collaborative head office, you’ll enjoy:

• 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)
• Wellbeing benefits including cycle to work and discounted gym membership
• A strong commitment to training and development

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 the 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 establish the platform’s engineering “north star” and ensure every squad can confidently move toward it.

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, ephemeral, 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. Your work makes high‑performance delivery repeatable, not heroic.

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 also 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.

What do we need from you?

1. Proven leadership in high‑performance delivery (VFQ excellence)
2. Deep craft in modern, cloud‑native engineering
3. Ability to build the right thing >> working backwards from members
4. A true technical multiplier with organisation‑wide influence
5. A values‑led, evidence‑driven mindset

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.
• Deep modern engineering craft: expert in secure‑by‑design, cloud‑native architecture, APIs/events, resilience engineering, IaC and policy‑as‑code CI/CD; comfortable defining language/dependency baselines and architectural boundaries other teams adopt with confidence.
• People leadership: a track record of managing engineers, building growth plans, giving clear feedback, and running fair, evidence‑based performance processes.
• Hiring & succession: you set the hiring bar, calibrate levels, and build succession by developing Staff/Senior engineers into future leaders.
• Delivery physics mastery (VFQ): proven ability to shorten lead time, increase deployment frequency, hold CFR low and improve MTTR, using trunk‑based development, progressive delivery (feature flags, canary, blue/green), automated rollback/forward‑fix and release‑linked observability.
• 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.
• On‑demand environments & data: you standardise ephemeral, production‑like environments with data‑on‑demand (masked/synthetic/seeded), parity checks and drift detection, so teams can release small, safe changes with confidence.
• Modernisation & decoupling at platform scale: 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.
• 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: 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.
• Values & culture: you role‑model Be Accountable, Be Curious, Be Collaborative, Be Brave, creating psychological safety, celebrating safe/fast releases and nurturing a culture of continuous improvement and craft excellence.
• Cross‑functional influence & risk judgement: 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, the happiest place to live in Great Britain. This is your chance to innovate, collaborate, and create technology that truly matters.