Senior Principal Engineer - Media

What we are looking for

At Skyscanner, our vision is to become the world's number one travel ally. As a Senior Principal Engineer for Media, 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 Media business products. These products connect over 110 million users each month across 180 countries and 37 languages to our media, brand, and advertising partners, enabling them to be successful on all of our platforms. 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, such as our Explore experience, 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.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and communicate a clear, long-term technical vision for our product experience, ensuring alignment with business goals, customer needs, and scalability.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership for large-scale initiatives that deliver measurable impact on growth and customer satisfaction.
• Explore and adopt emerging technologies (e.g. AI) to improve scalability, performance, and user experience.
• Establish guidelines and frameworks for building globally available, high-performing sites, platforms and apps.
• Promote internal open-source practices to encourage reuse, consistency, and efficiency across teams.
• Inspire, coach, and mentor engineers to build technical expertise and strategic thinking.
• Champion resilience, performance, and operational improvements in our systems.

What You Bring

• Experience in guiding high-traffic, globally available applications or platforms.
• Strong background in modern UX technology stacks (e.g., Swift, Kotlin, TypeScript) and microservices.
• Proven experience in designing and delivering product APIs (e.g. JSON+REST, gRPC).
• Familiarity with A/B testing, observability, and analytics frameworks to enable informed decision-making.
• Strong stakeholder management across product, engineering, analytics, and other cross-functional teams.
• Understanding of cloud services, web security, CDNs, and compliance for a global site.