Principal Engineer - Customer Engagement Platform

Job introduction

Principal Engineer – Dynamics, Power Platform, Workflow & Colleague Experience Engineering at Scale

The Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) powers how Skipton understands, supports, and communicates with its members and colleagues. It underpins our Dynamics 365 CRM, Power Platform solutions, case management, workflow automation, marketing capabilities, and the suite of colleague‑facing tools that enable thousands of interactions every day. As a Principal Engineer for CEP, you will set the engineering tenets, patterns and paved roads that enable these systems to operate with high performance, high reliability and high trust, ensuring colleagues can serve members with clarity, confidence and speed.

Your remit spans society‑wide technical direction, Value-Flow-Quality delivery physics, and engineering bar‑raising across the squads building on Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Power Automate and the CRM/engagement ecosystem. You define and embed cross‑cutting standards such as API/event contracts, workflow architecture, observability, resilience patterns, and dependency baselines, and drive adoption of the Golden Path: policy‑as‑code CI/CD, progressive delivery, automated rollback/forward‑fix, data‑ready environments, and secure‑by‑design guardrails. Your work ensures CEP delivers fast, safe, frequent improvements, enabling better service, reduced manual effort, richer insight and more personal, human interactions for members and colleagues alike. You’ll lead and manage engineers across CEP squads, developing people, stewarding performance and growth, and ensuring teams thrive as you scale paved roads and delivery standards 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 Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) is the system that powers how Skipton understands, supports and communicates with its members, and how colleagues across the Society deliver service that feels personal, connected and human. CEP enables the CRM, workflow, case management, marketing automation and low‑code applications that shape thousands of interactions every day. As these journeys scale in complexity and ambition, Skipton needs an engineering system capable of delivering fast, safe, frequent change while ensuring the platform remains resilient, compliant and deeply reliable. That is where the Principal Engineer becomes indispensable.

This role matters because the quality of Skipton’s member and colleague experience depends directly on engineering physics such as low lead time, high deployment frequency, low change‑failure rate and rapid recovery. You own these physics for CEP. You design the tenets, paved roads and guardrails that allow teams building on Dynamics 365, Power Platform and workflow automation to move with speed and confidence. Through Golden Path pipelines, policy‑as‑code, release‑linked observability, on‑demand environments and shift‑left quality, you turn high‑performance delivery into a normal, repeatable capability that compounds over time. This empowers colleagues, reduces manual effort, improves case completion, and ensures every member receives a more seamless, informed and human experience

And you’ll do this by leading engineers, growing skills, aligning practices across CRM and low‑code squads, and building a trusted environment where teams ship small, safe, frequent improvements confidently.

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 CEP, you’ll set the technical direction, engineering tenets and paved roads that govern how our Dynamics 365, Power Platform, CRM, case management, workflow and marketing automation capabilities are designed, built, tested, deployed and operated, so teams can deliver small, safe, frequent changes with low lead time, high deployment frequency, low CFR and rapid recovery as the norm.

• Define and standardise the Golden Path for CEP: establish secure‑by‑default, policy‑as‑code CI/CD for Dynamics and Power Platform solutions (including solution packaging/ALM), set patterns for progressive delivery (feature flags, canary/blue‑green) and automated rollback/forward‑fix, and provide reusable service blueprints and deployable modules that make fast, safe delivery repeatable across squads.
• Architect for reliability, observability and flow: codify API/event contracts, workflow orchestration patterns and dependency baselines; instrument release‑linked observability with deployment annotations, traces and golden signals; and embed SLOs/error budgets so Value-Flow-Quality improvements are guided by evidence rather than opinion.
• Make on‑demand environments & data the default: champion ephemeral, production‑like environments and data‑on‑demand (masked/synthetic/seeded), enforce parity and drift detection, and expose environment readiness signals so CRM, workflow and low‑code changes can ship in small, safe batches with confidence
• Shift‑left quality and security: embed contract, performance, resilience and security tests in CI for CEP services and extensions; enforce push‑protection, SAST/SCA/DAST and SBOM/provenance; and evolve compliance‑as‑code guardrails that balance speed with safety across Dynamics 365, Power Apps and Power Automate solutions
• Lead the CEP modernisation roadmap: drive decoupling, core refactoring, resilience uplift and tech‑debt retirement for CRM and workflow domains; clarify versioned boundaries and platform contracts so product teams can move independently while the platform remains coherent, reliable and easy to consume.
• Operational excellence and recovery: run failure‑mode testing and recovery drills; tighten MTTR via playbooks and telemetry; ensure incident/problem management generates audit‑ready evidence and lasting improvements across CEP’s Dynamics, Power Platform and marketing stacks.
• Coach, multiply, and raise the bar: mentor Staff/Senior engineers, lead Communities of Practice, publish reusable CEP templates (pipelines, ALM patterns, connectors, event schemas), shape the hiring bar, and use decision narratives to improve clarity and judgement across engineering and platform teams.
• Work backwards from colleagues and members: use journey data, case telemetry and colleague feedback to invent on their behalf, ensuring CRM, workflow and automation capabilities feel simpler, faster and more human, enabling colleagues to finish more journeys and deliver consistently personal service

What do we need from you?

1) Lead high‑performance delivery (VFQ) across CRM & automation

A track record of reducing lead time, increasing deployment frequency, and keeping change‑failure rate low by default, using automation‑first pipelines, policy‑as‑code CI/CD, progressive delivery, release‑linked observability and data‑ready environments to make fast, safe flow the norm for Dynamics 365, Power Platform and workflow solutions.

2) Build the right things >> working backwards from colleagues & members

You start from outcomes and evidence: journey data, case telemetry and colleague feedback. You invent on their behalf and ensure CEP delivers CRM, case management and automation capabilities that feel simpler, faster and more human, enabling colleagues to finish more journeys and serve members with confidence.

3) Deep craft in CEP engineering & ALM at scale

Hands‑on mastery of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate) engineering patterns and ALM (solution packaging, environments, branching, automated deployments). Comfortable defining API/event contracts, workflow orchestration patterns, dependency baselines and secure‑by‑design guardrails tailored to CEP.

4) Paved‑road enablement & platform modernisation

Proven ability to define and scale CEP Golden Path assets — opinionated pipelines, reusable ALM patterns, connectors, event schemas, IaC modules and service blueprints — plus a 1–3 year modernisation roadmap (decoupling, resilience uplift, tech‑debt retirement) that teams adopt because it makes the right path the easy path..

5) Organisation‑wide influence, clarity & values

You mentor, manage and lead engineers, lead Communities of Practice, raise the hiring bar and improve decision quality through crisp narratives. You partner seamlessly with Platform Ownership, Architecture, Security, QE, Environments, Release, Risk and Audit, role‑modelling Be Accountable, Be Curious, Be Collaborative, Be Brave while taking evidence‑led decisions.

What You’ll Bring

You bring company‑wide technical influence, clear judgement, and a track record of setting the tenets, patterns and paved roads that engineers rely on to deliver fast, safe, frequent change across Dynamics 365, Power Platform, CRM and workflow domains. Your blend of platform‑scale delivery excellence and outcome‑led product instinct enables colleagues to finish more journeys and serve members with confidence.

• CEP engineering mastery: deep, hands‑on experience with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate) plus CRM/case/workflow/marketing extensions, with pragmatic ALM habits (solution packaging, environments, branching and automated deployments) at scale.
• Team growth & coaching: experience managing engineers and upskilling teams on Dynamics/Power Platform ALM, CI/CD and observability to lift VFQ.
• Culture & clarity: you build psychological safety and a habit of crisp design/decision narratives that scale judgement across squads.
• Delivery physics (VFQ) built‑in: proven ability to shorten lead time, increase deployment frequency, hold CFR low and improve MTTR, using policy‑as‑code CI/CD, trunk‑based development, feature flags, canary/blue‑green, automated rollback/forward‑fix and release‑linked observability.
• Observability & reliability by default: you instrument CEP services with deployment annotations, traces and golden signals; define SLOs/error budgets; and run recovery drills so reliability improves as speed increases.
• Secure‑by‑design & compliance‑as‑code: you enforce push‑protection, SAST/SCA/DAST, IaC scanning, SBOM/provenance and guardrails that balance speed with safety for Dynamics and Power Platform solutions.
• On‑demand environments & data: you make ephemeral, production‑like environments and data‑on‑demand (masked/synthetic/seeded) the default, with parity checks and drift detection that enable small, safe batches.
• Paved‑road enablement & reuse: you publish reusable CEP assets — pipelines/ALM patterns, connectors, event schemas, IaC modules, service blueprints — so squads adopt the right path because it’s the easy path.
• Outcome‑led judgement: you work backwards from colleague and member outcomes (journey data, case telemetry, feedback), inventing on their behalf so CRM, workflow and automation experiences feel simpler, faster and more human.
• Cross‑functional influence & culture: you partner seamlessly with Platform Owner, Architecture, Security, QE, Environments, Release, Risk and Audit; and you role‑model Skipton’s behaviours to grow craft, psychological safety and continuous improvement.
• Commercial & platform judgement: you bring evidence‑based decision‑making to licensing, supplier and budget conversations in partnership with Platform Ownership, ensuring investments translate into measurable platform outcomes.

Ready to Make an Impact?

Join us and help build the next generation of digital solutions at Skipton, the happiest place to live in Great Britain. This is your chance to innovate, collaborate, and create technology that truly matters.