Principal Engineer – Core Banking
The Core Banking Platform is the engine that underpins how Skipton records, manages and protects the financial lives of its members. It supports every savings and mortgage account, every transaction posted, every interest calculation and every product change processed across the Society. These are systems that must be accurate, resilient and deeply trustworthy.
As Principal Engineer, you’ll define the engineering standards, patterns and “paved roads” that enable this mission-critical platform to operate with high performance, reliability and integrity. You’ll guide squads working on savings, mortgages and transaction-processing services, helping them deliver small, safe, frequent changes while maintaining the stability and compliance expected from a financial institution.
You’ll shape platform-wide technical direction, enabling our business-focused product teams to deliver member value faster, safer, smarter. While our core systems are primarily built in JADE, we welcome engineers who are comfortable working with long-lived, business-critical technologies, regardless of specific language background.
Your leadership will reduce manual effort, improve operational flow, strengthen accuracy and help colleagues serve members with greater confidence. Above all, you’ll foster an engineering culture rooted in clarity, accountability and continuous improvement.
Who Are We?
We are the UK’s fourth largest building society, proudly mutual and committed to doing the right thing for our customers and colleagues. Being a mutual, we are member owned and this shapes every decision we make.
Our people say Skipton is a great place to work, and it’s officially recognised as the happiest place to live in Great Britain. We’re a place where you can grow, thrive and make a genuine impact, whatever your background or ambitions.
Why This Role Matters
Core Banking sits at the centre of every financial journey our members take. When someone saves with us, takes out a mortgage, makes a payment or reviews their balance, they’re relying on these systems and the engineering behind them.
As expectations grow, we need a modern, dependable engineering foundation that can move quickly without ever compromising accuracy, resilience or regulatory compliance. This is where you come in.
You’ll embed the delivery physics that matter most: low lead time, high deployment frequency, low change-failure rate and rapid recovery. You’ll equip teams with paved roads, Golden Path pipelines, strong observability and secure environments that make fast, safe change the norm.
You’ll also grow skills across squads, align engineering practices and create a trusted environment where teams confidently ship small, frequent, high-quality updates. Your influence will help ensure Core Banking remains the most stable, compliant and strategically important platform in the Society.
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 Core Banking, you’ll set technical direction, establish engineering tenets and design the platform foundations that engineers rely on.
You will:
- Define and scale the Golden Path for Core Banking, engineered specifically for our large, critical Core applications embedding secure pipelines, controlled release strategies and resilience-first patterns that allow teams to deliver change safely and confidently as we modernise the platform.
- Architect for reliability and observability, shaping API/event contracts, posting and settlement patterns, product and account boundaries and platform dependency baselines.
- Shift left on quality and security, embedding contract, performance, resilience and security checks into CI, alongside policy-as-code and compliance-as-code controls.
- Lead platform modernisation, including decoupling legacy components, lifting resilience, clarifying domain boundaries and systematically reducing technical debt.
- Improve operational excellence, running recovery drills, refining telemetry and ensuring incidents produce actionable, audit-ready improvements.
- Coach and develop engineers, publish reusable templates and patterns, raise the hiring bar and lead Communities of Practice.
- Work backwards from member and colleague outcomes, using operational insight to simplify, stabilise and enhance servicing and financial workflows.
What We Need From You
- High-performance delivery (VFQ) A proven ability to reduce lead time, increase deployment frequency and maintain low change-failure rates across complex, high-integrity platforms. You use automation, policy-as-code CI/CD, observability and progressive delivery to create safe, predictable flow.
- Outcome-led thinking You start with colleague and member outcomes, using operational telemetry, accuracy signals and servicing insight to guide priorities and shape product engineering decisions.
- Deep craft in Core Banking engineering Hands-on experience with financial domains such as savings, mortgages, posting engines, interest calculations and ledger-integrated workflows. You know how to define clear contracts, boundaries and secure-by-design patterns.
- Influence, clarity and values You develop engineers, shape engineering practice, partner with Architecture, Security, QE, Release, Risk and Audit, and make evidence-led decisions. You role-model Skipton’s values, accountable, curious, collaborative and brave.
What You’ll Bring
- Strong technical influence across large, mission-critical platforms
- The ability to set engineering direction and platform standards
- Experience with long-lived, high-integrity systems (JADE experience helpful but not required)
- Proven capability in CI/CD, observability, resilience engineering and secure-by-design practices
- A track record of improving lead time, deployment frequency, CFR and MTTR
- The ability to simplify complex systems and guide modernisation at scale
- An outcome-focused mindset grounded in operational data and colleague insight
- Collaborative leadership across the full platform ecosystem
- Commercial judgement that ensures investments deliver measurable value
Ready to Make an Impact?
Join us and help shape the next generation of Core Banking at Skipton building the systems that support millions of financial journeys and help colleagues deliver accurate, reliable and human service every day.
Top Skills
What We Do
Not just another building society. Not just another job. Imagine how good it would feel to help someone choose the mortgage they’ll use to buy their first home. Or the account they’ll use to save for it. We’ve been helping people make big financial decisions since 1853. It’s why over a million customers trust us as a good place for their money, and why our colleagues say we’re a good place to work. The Bailey (our head office) The Bailey is the vibrant hub where you’ll find all our central functions. We’re always looking for new talent because we love hearing new ideas. You can choose from a variety of roles that range from marketing and IT, through to audit, risk, products, digital and more – or maybe you’ll join our lively contact centre team. We’re based in Skipton, just a short train ride from Bradford and Leeds, we’re a stone’s throw from the A65 and have some cracking views of the Yorkshire Dales. Our network of UK branches Our branch colleagues are the face of Skipton Building Society. They’re relationship-builders, team workers, great talkers and they’re brilliant at listening too. Everything they do is designed to help customers make the best financial decisions, whether that’s choosing the right kind of savings account or having a full financial review. The Skipton culture Happy colleagues mean happy customers. So, when we recruit, we don’t just think about what’s in it for us, we think about what’s in it for you. It’s one of the reasons we’ve been recognised as one of The Times Best Companies to Work for the last 6 years. Mind, body and spirit With our colleagues’ support, we’ve created a culture that promotes diversity and inclusion. We understand the rich diversity in our Society, and how harnessing that diversity through effective inclusive practice has profound benefits for individuals, teams and the Society it self. This includes a progressive approach to personal well-being.
