Principal Engineer - Identity & Privacy

About Skyscanner

Skyscanner has dedicated 20 years to simplifying travel planning, serving 160 million travelers each month by helping them quickly find flights, cars, and hotels. The company’s ambition is to become the world's leading travel companion accessible to everyone.

Role Overview

We seek a Principal Engineer specializing in Identity & Privacy, a senior technical leadership role based in Glasgow with hybrid working. This role is crucial in establishing the technical foundation for building traveler trust while unlocking advanced data and AI capabilities across personalisation, experimentation, and advertising.

This position entails ownership of technical strategy and standards related to identity, consent, and privacy engineering, spanning multiple platforms including web, app, backend, experimentation, analytics, advertising, and machine learning.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and communicate a comprehensive, long-term technical vision and roadmap for identity, consent, and privacy engineering that aligns with product goals and traveler trust.
• Lead the design and implementation of purpose-specific identifiers and consent-aware data handling across sessions, tracking mechanisms, advertising, accounts, and derived data.
• Integrate identity and consent workflows seamlessly across client interfaces, backend services, event pipelines, and downstream data consumers.
• Translate privacy principles and legal compliance into pragmatic engineering solutions, including reusable patterns, platform controls, and measurable standards covering data retention, deletion, masking, access control, and audit processes.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams such as Engineering, Product, Legal, Privacy, Security, Data Governance, Data Science, Marketing, Ads, and Analytics to resolve trade-offs and clarify complex challenges.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership for key initiatives including consent platform development, privacy-safe experimentation, and traveler trust features while promoting simple, scalable, and cost-effective architectures.
• Enhance engineering quality through observability, health metrics, incident analysis, mentoring colleagues, and fostering inclusive and high-standard collaboration across the engineering community.

Candidate Profile

• Extensive experience in privacy engineering with practical application of global data protection frameworks such as GDPR, PECR, CCPA/CPRA.
• Proven expertise in designing, building, and managing large-scale distributed systems related to identity, data platforms, consent management, authentication, advertising tech, or customer data infrastructure.
• Strong leadership skills with the ability to drive technical transformation across multiple teams without direct authority, building alignment and momentum.
• Excellent technical judgement balancing product value, trust, privacy compliance, operational reliability, and cost considerations.
• Broad understanding spanning client applications, backend, event-driven architectures, data products, machine learning, analytics, partner data exports, and operational tools, appreciating their interdependencies.
• Capability to translate policies into enforceable technical controls and measurable quality standards adopted by engineering teams.
• Effective communicator able to craft clear technical strategy and work collaboratively with senior stakeholders in Engineering, Product, Legal, Security, and Data Governance.
• Experience or familiarity with relevant tools and concepts such as privacy and consent management technologies, experimentation platforms, personalization, ad measurement, Databricks, OpenTelemetry, SQL, and AI-assisted engineering workflows is advantageous but not mandatory.

The Work Culture

Skyscanner is committed to a genuine and transparent workplace culture comprised of curious and supportive individuals passionate about simplifying travel for all. The company values diversity, is an equal opportunity employer, and strives to create an inclusive environment with accessible products.

Additional Information

Applications are welcomed from everyone, and accommodations are available throughout the recruitment process for those who require them. The company also provides family-friendly policies, including paid parental leave typically offering a minimum of 24 weeks of birth parent/maternity leave globally.