Principal Engineer for the Digital Experience Platform

Skipton Building Society; Skipton; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

25 days plus holidays

Holiday trading

Pension contributions up to 10%

Mortgage assistance

Hybrid/electric car salary sacrifice

Private medical insurance

Volunteer days

Networking groups

Wellbeing program

Training & development

Job summary

Skipton Building Society invites a Principal Engineer to shape the Digital Experience Platform, setting the engineering tenets, patterns and paved roads that power our public websites and Design System.

You will lead a high-performing team, coach engineers, and collaborate with Architecture, DevSecOps and QE to deliver secure-by-design, scalable platforms using AEMaaCS, Java, React and .NET, while maintaining fast, safe releases and strong accessibility.

Qualifications

• Proven leadership in high-performance delivery and VFQ excellence.
• Deep craft in modern, cloud-native engineering and secure-by-design.
• Ability to work backwards from user needs with data-driven decisions.

Responsibilities

• Set engineering direction, tenets and paved roads for DEP.
• Define patterns, guardrails and architectural boundaries for safe, frequent changes.
• Coach engineers, grow craft and shape hiring standards across teams.

Skills

Leadership

VFQ (Value-Flow-Quality)

Cloud-native engineering

AEMaaCS

Web platform development

Security-by-design

Policy-as-code CI/CD

Observability

Design System

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)

Java

React

.NET

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.

• 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, epithelial, 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., 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