Senior Principal Engineer

What are we looking for 

At Skyscanner, our vision is to become the world's number one travel ally. As a Senior Principal Engineer for Meta Search, you will play a key role in realising this vision by ensuring that our product experience is scalable, reliable, secure, usable and capable of supporting our global reach. 

As a Senior Principal Engineer, you will shape the technical direction of our meta search product, which connects over 110 million users each month across 180 countries and 37 languages to more than 1,200 flight, hotel, and car hire partners, enabling them to find the best prices. 

Meta search is central to our business, and the technical decisions we make have a direct and immediate impact on how users interact with our site and the traffic we drive to our partners. As the senior technical leader in this area of the business you will have a pivotable role in defining long term technical strategy, leading our engineers on how best to design and validate new product experiences across multiple UX platforms, ensuring that we operate securely and efficiently at scale, support the development and adoption of new technology standards, whilst guiding the evolution of our product platform APIs. 

Role Summary 

Title: Senior Principal Engineer 

Organisation: Meta Search Product Experience (Flights, Accommodation and Cars, Rail and Packages) 

Location: Glasgow, Edinburgh, or London 

Reports to: Myra Fulton, VP of Engineering 

Scope: 15+ business domains, 150+ engineers 

Key Responsibilities 

• Define and communicate the long-term technical vision for our meta-search product experience, ensuring alignment with business objectives, customer needs, and scalability goals 

• Serve as the primary technical stakeholder driving the strategic evolution of Skyscanner’s product platforms APIs, ensuring the meet the needs of a growing global user base and our internal engineering teams  

• Provide technical leadership for large-scale, multi-quarter product initiatives and transformation projects, delivering impactful outcomes that drive business growth and enhanced customer satisfaction 

• Collaborate with cross-functional leaders to align product and engineering strategies on business objectives, driving cohesive plans and impactful results 

• Drive innovation and the strategic adoption of emerging technologies (such as AI or edge computing) to enhance site performance, scalability, and user experience, fostering a culture of technical experimentation and informed prototyping aligned with long-term goals 

• Set and evolve technology guidelines for building globally available sites and apps, leveraging industry standards for UX architecture while fostering innovation tailored to customer needs 

• Inspire, coach, and mentor engineers to contribute to and refine the long-term technical vision, fostering technical expertise and strategic thinking across the organisation 

• Enable high-quality, rapid technical decision-making by guiding engineers with clear frameworks, best practices, and technical expertise to navigate complex challenges 

• Foster a culture of engineering collaboration by promoting internal open-source practices, encouraging teams to contribute to and reuse shared platforms, tools, and frameworks, driving consistency, innovation, and efficiency across the organisation 

• Champion a culture of operational excellence and continuous improvement, empowering engineers to deliver resilient, high-performance systems and measurable efficiencies within a high-growth travel business 

The Person 

• Extensive experience in technical leadership for a globally available, high-traffic eCommerce site or digital-native environment, with a proven ability to drive scalability, resilience, and customer satisfaction 

• Strong full-stack experience with modern UX technology stacks (native app and/or Web) and microservice-based distributed systems, leveraging languages such as Swift, Kotlin, Typescript or Java 

• Proven expertise in product platform API strategy, design, implementation, and lifecycle management, with hands-on experience using JSON+REST and/or gRPC. 

• Experience in designing and developing Data/AI-enabled products that deliver personalised user experiences, such as recommendation systems, dynamic pricing, or targeted content delivery 

• A proven advocate for data-informed decision-making, with experience implementing observability, analytics, and A/B testing frameworks to measure impact and drive continuous improvement 

• Exceptional stakeholder management skills, fostering collaboration across analytics, commercial, customer experience, data science, engineering, marketing, and product to deliver cohesive and impactful solutions 

• Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure services, including CDNs, web traffic security controls, and third-party integrations (e.g. Consent Management Platforms or GTM), ensuring performance, security, and compliance 

• Understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities in building globally accessible applications, such as localisation, regional compliance, and infrastructure optimisation 

• Proven ability to collaborate with product organisations to define and uphold service levels, ensuring reliability, performance, and customer satisfaction 

• Demonstrable experience fostering a culture of engineering collaboration, including driving adoption of internal open-source practices or contributing to leading open-source projects, building shared platforms, tools, or frameworks that enable teams to collaborate effectively 

• Demonstrated success in leading and mentoring principal engineers, fostering technical excellence, career growth, and strategic impact across the organisation 

• Experience working with distributed teams across different locations and timezones