Principal Engineer in Skipton, Yorkshire

At Skipton, we're building the modern mutual of the future, where seamless, secure and intuitive digital experiences help our members feel supported at every moment that matters. The Member Experience Platform is at the heart of this ambition, powering our Mobile App, Member Portal and Customer Identity capabilities.

As our Senior Platform Owner, you'll take strategic ownership of this critical platform and help define the next generation of member-facing digital experiences across Homes, Money and Membership, ensuring our services feel effortless, personal and human. Your leadership will directly shape the digital channels used daily by more than a million members, giving you the rare opportunity to make a meaningful difference at real scale.

You’ll guide long-lived cross-functional teams working with autonomy and purpose across App, Portal and Identity capabilities, supported by the Society's modern engineering ecosystem, including automation-first CI/CD pipelines, observability by default, decoupled architecture, cloud platforms, API and event-streaming foundations.

Working in partnership with Product Owners, Platform Leads, Engineers, Security, Architecture and Data teams, you'll own the multi-year platform vision, define platform contracts and standards, drive resilience and accessibility, and continuously evolve the platform to meet the needs of members, brokers and colleagues. You'll role-model our behaviours: Be Accountable, Be Curious, Be Collaborative, Be Brave, and foster a culture where teams can innovate safely, experiment, and deliver small, frequent improvements that compound into exceptional experiences.

This is a true leadership opportunity: you'll manage platform budgets, align technology and business stakeholders, ensure world-class identity and authentication journeys, champion secure-by-design practices, and nurture a healthy technology culture where talented people can thrive.

If you're excited by the idea of shaping one of the most important platforms in the organisation and building digital experiences that genuinely help people save, buy homes, and feel confident about their financial futures, we'd love to talk to you.

The Member Experience Platform sits at the very heart of Skipton's digital relationship with its members, powering the Mobile App, Member Portal, and Customer Identity capabilities that enable people to securely access, manage and enhance their financial lives. As we continue to build a modern mutual grounded in simplicity, trust and great digital experiences, this platform is one of the Society's most important strategic assets.

We deliver value through small, safe, frequent changes, powered by a system designed for flow and quality. Your leadership will ensure our digital channels feel seamless, intuitive, resilient and personal, enabling journeys that finish more often and feel more human across Homes, Money and Membership. You'll shape how members interact with us every day and create the foundations for future innovation across authentication, personalisation, omni-channel journeys and member value.

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

You’ll provide strategic leadership across the entire Member Experience Platform, setting a multi-year vision that unifies our App, Portal and Identity capabilities into a coherent, stable and continuously improving ecosystem. You’ll oversee sub-platforms led by Platform Managers, ensuring clear platform contracts, versioned architectural boundaries, and consistent standards for performance, scalability, security, access management and resilience.

Working closely with Engineering, Architecture, Security, Data and Product, you’ll guide technology adoption, steward platform budgets, optimise resource allocation, and champion automation-first and observability-by-default practices. You’ll mentor cross-functional teams, elevate craft and capability, and embed healthy platform governance, risk management, continuous improvement and incident/problem management.

You’ll act as a senior voice in shaping digital identity, device security, authentication journeys and friction-free sign-in experiences. Through Skipton's delivery mechanism, you’ll ensure the right changes land safely, in small steps, and deliver meaningful improvements to our members every month.

What do we need from you?

• Leadership in high-performance digital delivery: A track record of driving fast, safe flow, reducing lead times, increasing deployment frequency, and keeping change-failure rates consistently low through automation-first, observability-led and decoupled delivery practices.
• Obsession with building the right thing for members: You work backwards from member needs, use insight and evidence to invent on their behalf, and shape world-class App, Portal and Identity experiences that are simple, personal and intuitive.
• Strategic platform ownership at scale: Deep experience managing complex digital platforms, in a complex ecosystem, setting multi-year vision, shaping architecture, defining standards and ensuring the platform is secure, resilient, scalable and continuously improving.
• Inspirational leadership & cross-functional influence: A skilled leader who can mentor Platform Leads, Product Owners and engineers, build strong partnerships across Architecture, Security, Risk, Product and Finance, and communicate complexity with clarity.
• A values-led, data-driven mindset: A role model for Skipton's behaviours - Accountable, Curious, Collaborative, Brave - making evidence-led decisions, managing suppliers and budgets effectively, and creating a culture of continuous improvement and psychological safety.

What You’ll Bring

You’ll be a strategic platform leader with deep experience in managing complex digital platforms at scale, ideally spanning mobile, web and identity technologies. You bring a blend of strong architectural awareness, platform lifecycle management expertise, and the ability to translate business needs into a clear platform roadmap shaped by evidence and data. You excel at inspiring and developing teams, influencing senior stakeholders, and driving high standards around security, access control, resilience, automation, performance and user experience.

You’ll be comfortable leading within a product-centred, agile, platform-based organisation, balancing operational excellence with forward-looking innovation. Strong communication, budgeting, supplier management and risk ownership come naturally to you, alongside the ability to mentor others and nurture a collaborative, psychologically safe engineering culture. Most importantly, you role-model Skipton's behaviours and you're excited by the chance to shape the digital experiences of a modernising mutual serving millions of members.

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.