Principal Engineer – Digital Experience Platform
Hours: 35 hours per week, hybrid.
Closing Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2026.
The Digital Experience Platform (DEP) powers Skipton’s public websites and our Design System. Our websites and digital journeys serve our members, prospects, customers and brokers through millions of visits each month. The Design System provides consistency across User Interfaces for our products and platforms, ensuring an accessible and intuitive digital experience.
About the Role
As Principal Engineer, you will set the engineering tenets, patterns and pave roads that DEP and its products depend on every day. You will maximise the use of platform capabilities, strengthen engineering fundamentals, define engineering and delivery standards, and establish guardrails that make security and compliance by design. You will partner with Architecture, Platform Ownership, UI Design, DevSecOps, Environments, Release, and Quality Engineering to deliver small, safe, frequent changes so DEP ships world‑class, user‑centric experiences.
Additionally, you will lead a cohort of engineers, setting goals, raising the hiring bar, coaching, and building a high‑performance culture in partnership with the Platform Owner.
Key Responsibilities
- Define technical direction, engineering tenets, and pathways that shape how services are built, deployed and operated.
- Operate with company‑wide influence by defining patterns, guardrails and architectural boundaries that enable low lead times, high deployment frequency and fast recovery.
- Establish the platform’s engineering “north star” and guide teams toward it.
- Design and evolve the Golden Path for DEP, including secure‑by‑default CI/CD pipelines, policy‑as‑code, progressive delivery frameworks and on‑demand, data‑ready environments.
- Improve Value–Flow–Quality (VFQ) by strengthening delivery flows, test automation, embedding quality in CI, and building release‑linked observability tied to metrics, logs, traces and golden signals.
- Own the engineering strategy for evolving the platform to maximise use of AEM, the Design System, and other subsystems.
- Collaborate with Architecture, DevSecOps, Environments, Release & Deployment and Quality Engineering to ensure consistent design, operability, risk controls, and secure‑by‑design foundations.
- Act as a multiplier of engineering excellence across Skipton – coaching colleagues, leading Communities of Practice, and shaping the hiring bar.
Qualifications
- Proven leadership in high‑performance delivery (VFQ excellence) with a track record of reducing lead time, increasing deployment frequency and maintaining low change‑failure rates.
- Deep craft in modern, cloud‑native engineering: experience with AEM, web platform development, secure‑by‑design, cloud‑native architecture, distributed systems, API/event patterns, resilience, IaC, policy‑as‑code CI/CD, observability and progressive delivery.
- Ability to build the right thing by working backwards from user needs, using journey data, telemetry and user insight.
- Influential technical multiplier with organization‑wide influence – raising the bar across squads, defining reusable templates, managing and leading engineers, and improving decision quality through clear narratives.
- Values‑led, evidence‑driven mindset: accountability, curiosity, collaboration, bravery, and use of scorecard signals, SLOs, error budgets and delivery metrics.
What You’ll Bring
- Expertise in secure‑by‑design, cloud‑native architecture, APIs/events, resilience engineering, IaC and policy‑as‑code CI/CD.
- Ability to maximise platform capabilities and improve developer experience in AEM and the Design System.
- Front‑end & web engineering expertise – accessibility, technical optimisation, site performance, and cross‑platform UI consistency via the Design System.
- People leadership – experience coaching, mentoring and developing engineering teams.
- Delivery physics mastery (VFQ) with proven ability to shorten lead time and increase deployment frequency.
- User‑centred judgement – working backwards from user outcomes and telemetry.
- Cross‑functional influence & risk judgement – partnering seamlessly with Architecture, UI Design, DevSecOps, Environments, Release, QE, Risk and Audit.
Benefits
- Annual discretionary bonus scheme
- 25 days annual leave plus 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 – cycle to work and discounted gym membership
- Strong commitment to training and development
Ready to Make an Impact?
Join us and help build the next generation of digital solutions at Skipton.
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