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, and on‑demand, data‑ready environments, enabling 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 You’ll Be Doing

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 change‑failure rate 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: secure‑by‑default, policy‑as‑code CI/CD pipelines; progressive delivery frameworks (feature flags, canary, blue/green, automated rollback/forward‑fix); and on‑demand, elastic, data‑ready environments.

You’ll define service blueprints, IaC modules, API/event patterns, dependency baselines and observability standards, making them the default way MEP ships value. Value‑Flow‑Quality (VFQ) is a critical focus. 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, change‑failure rate, 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.

What Do We Need From You?

• 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. You bring 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, ensuring App, Portal and Identity experiences are simple, secure, human and continuously improving.
• 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.
• 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 and celebrate safe, fast releases.

What You’ll Bring

• Company‑wide technical influence, clear judgement, and a track record of setting the tenets, patterns and paved roads that hundreds of engineers rely on.
• Deep engineering craft: expertise in secure‑by‑design, cloud‑native architecture, APIs/events, resilience engineering, IaC and policy‑as‑code CI/CD.
• People leadership: experience 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 change‑failure rate low and improve MTTR, using trunk‑based development and progressive delivery.

Benefits

• Great flexibility, hybrid working and a newly refurbished, collaborative head office.
• 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.
• Strong commitment to training and development.

Equal Opportunities

Skipton is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from all backgrounds and encourage a diverse workforce.