Principal Engineer - Digital Experience Platform

Skipton Building Society; Skipton; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

Holiday allowance

Pension up to 10%

Mortgage benefit

Hybrid & EV salary sacrifice

Private medical insurance

Volunteering days

Colleague networks

Wellbeing benefits

Training & development

Job summary

Skipton Building Society is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the Digital Experience Platform and set engineering tenets that shape strategy, delivery and security by design. You will drive VFQ excellence, scale AEM and our Design System, and empower engineers through coaching and architecture guidance.

You’ll partner with cross‑functional teams to maintain fast, secure, and reliable public digital channels, ensuring high standards and continuous improvement across the platform.

Qualifications

• Proven leadership in high‑performance delivery (VFQ excellence).
• Deep craft in cloud‑native, secure‑by‑design engineering.
• Ability to build the right thing by working backwards from user needs.
• Technical multiplier with organisation‑wide influence.
• Value‑led, evidence‑driven mindset and decision making.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction, engineering tenets and paved roads.
• Define patterns, guardrails and architectural boundaries.
• Coach engineers and lead Communities of Practice.
• Raise the hiring bar and mentor teams.
• Collaborate with Architecture, DevSecOps, QE, Risk and Audit.

Skills

VFQ delivery

Leadership

Cloud-native engineering

AEM & Design System

Front-end & web engineering

Mentoring

Observability & metrics

Tools

AEMaaCS

CI/CD

IaC

Job description

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. Our Design System provides consistency across User Interfaces for our products and platforms, to ensure an accessible and intuitive digital experience.

As Principal Engineer, you set the engineering tenets, patterns and paved roads that these platforms and products (and the teams who build them) depend on every day. The technologies and platforms used within this platform group include our enterprise content management system Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), along with Java, React, React Native, .NET.

Operating across the platform scale, you will maximise the use of platform capabilities and strengthen our engineering fundamentals. You will define engineering, technical design and delivery standards, drive adoption through the Golden Path, and establish guardrails that make security and compliance by design

You partner with Architecture, Platform Ownership, UI Design, DevSecOps, Environments, Release, and Quality Engineering to turn strategy into small, safe, frequent changes, so DEP ships world‑class, user‑centric experiences that feel simple, personal and human, every week.

You’ll also lead and manage a cohort of engineers within DEP — 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

Who Are We?

Not just another building society. Not just another job.

We’re the fourth largest building society in the UK, and proudly mutual, owned by our members, not shareholders. That means every decision we make is about doing the right thing for our customers and colleagues.

Our people say Skipton is a great place to work, and now it’s officially recognised as the happiest place to live in Great Britain. Whatever your background or ambitions, we’ll help you grow, thrive, and shape a better future.

Why This Role Matters

The Digital Experience Platform is Skipton’s public digital experience, our public sites and journeys are our digital branches for members, brokers and online visitors who come to Skipton to self‑serve for products, services, support and information. Our Design System ensures consistency, shaping the UI experience across multiple applications, products and platforms through several technologies.

This is where the Principal Engineer becomes pivotal. This role directly shapes the reliability, accessibility and performance of our public digital channels, ensuring our AEM and Design System foundations deliver fast, intuitive and inclusive customer‑facing journeys

You will ensure Skipton maximise the use of AEM Platform capabilities empowering engineers and AEM users, lead engineering for non‑AEM sites, and ensure our Design System has first‑class engineering.

You’ll own and embed the delivery physics and develop Engineers — aligning teams on the same tenets, and creating a culture where psychological safety and high standards co‑exist.

What’s In It For You

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

What You’ll Be Doing

As Principal Engineer for the Digital Experience Platform, you will set the technical direction, engineering tenets and paved roads that shape how our 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 team can confidently move toward it.

You will design and evolve the Golden Path for DEP: our secure‑by‑default, policy‑as‑code CI/CD pipelines; progressive delivery frameworks and on‑demand, ephemera, data‑ready environments.

A critical focus of your role is Value–Flow–Quality (VFQ), improve delivery flows, strengthen test automation and embed quality inside CI, and build release‑linked observability that ties every deployment to metrics, logs, traces and golden signals.

You will also own the engineering strategy that enables the platform to evolve, to maximise the use of AEM and the Design System, along with other sub-platfoms within DEP. 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 colleagues/Senior Engineers, leading Communities of Practice, shaping the hiring bar, authoring design/decision narratives.

What do we need from you?

1. 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 to make fast, safe flow the norm – with daily/weekly delivery of value the norm.

2. Deep craft in modern, cloud‑native engineering

You bring expertise in maturing our use of our content management platform AEMaaCS. Expertise in Web platform development, 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. Your technical grounding allows you to set the tenets other engineers depend on.

3. Ability to build the right thing >> working backwards from user needs

You use journey data, telemetry and user insight to invent on their behalf, ensuring Public Website, AEM and cross‑platform experiences are simple, secure, human and continuously improving.

4. A true technical multiplier with organisation‑wide influence

You raise the bar across squads and platforms, defining reusable templates, components, capabilities, 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.

5. A values‑led, evidence‑driven mindset

You’ll 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 clarity, judgement and ownership expected of a Principal at top engineering organisations.

What You’ll Bring

• 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.
• Ability to maximise use of platform capabilities: improve developer experience in AEM, Design System and technologies used within the platform group.
• Front‑end & web engineering expertise: understanding of accessibility, technical optimisation, site performance and cross‑platform UI consistency using our Design System.
• People leadership: experience in coaching, mentoring and developing engineering teams.
• Delivery physics mastery (VFQ): proven ability to shorten lead time, increase deployment frequency delivering safe, fast flow.
• User‑centred judgement: you work backwards from user outcomes and journey telemetry to invent on their behalf, ensuring DEP ships world‑class experiences that feel simple, personal and human.
• Cross‑functional influence & risk judgement: you partner seamlessly with Platform Ownership, UI Design, DevSecOps, Environments, Release, QE, Architecture, Risk and Audit — balancing speed with security, compliance‑as‑code and audit‑ready evidence