Principal Engineer - Identity & Privacy

About Skyscanner

Skyscanner is a trusted global travel brand with a 20-year legacy, helping around 160 million travelers each month navigate the complexities of travel planning. Our mission is to become the world's leading travel ally, delivering seamless booking experiences for flights, cars, and hotels.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Principal Engineer specializing in Identity & Privacy to lead our technical innovation in this critical domain. This senior leadership position involves defining long-term technical strategies that establish traveler trust and enhance our capabilities in data-driven personalization, experimentation, and advertising. You will set standards and guide engineering practices across all traveler-facing products and supporting systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and communicate a strategic roadmap for identity, consent, and privacy engineering aligned with product, trust, data, and AI objectives.
• Design and oversee scalable identity systems that handle purpose-specific identifiers and consent-sensitive data workflows for sessions, tracking, accounts, and advertising.
• Create comprehensive data flows integrating client platforms, backend services, event streams, and data consumers to simplify complex ecosystems.
• Implement privacy principles and legal requirements into engineering methodologies, including retention policies, data deletion, masking, access controls, and auditing capabilities.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams such as Engineering, Product, Legal, Privacy, Security, Data Governance, and Marketing to make informed trade-offs and align efforts.
• Provide hands-on leadership for major initiatives spanning consent platforms, privacy-conscious experimentation, data lifecycle management, and traveler trust features, advocating for simple, scalable, cost-effective solutions.
• Promote engineering excellence through the use of observability tools, health metrics, incident analysis, and mentorship to advance team standards and collaboration culture.

Candidate Profile

• Proven expertise in translating data privacy laws like GDPR, PECR, CCPA/CPRA into actionable engineering solutions while engaging effectively with Legal, Privacy, Security, and Governance stakeholders.
• Experience designing, constructing, and operating large-scale distributed systems related to identity management, consent solutions, authentication, advertising technology, or customer data infrastructure.
• Demonstrated technical leadership influencing multiple teams and stakeholders without direct managerial authority, fostering alignment and momentum.
• Strong decision-making skills balancing product value, privacy, operational reliability, traveler trust, and cost effectiveness.
• Comprehensive understanding of end-to-end system architecture covering client interfaces, backend services, event streams, data platforms, machine learning features, analytics, and operational tooling.
• Ability to convert privacy policies into enforceable technical standards and reusable controls within engineering workflows.
• Excellent communication and collaboration abilities to develop shared engineering practices and articulate technical strategies for diverse stakeholder groups.
• Familiarity with privacy/consent technologies, experimentation systems, personalization, advertising measurement, Databricks, OpenTelemetry, SQL, and AI-assisted engineering practices are advantageous but not mandatory.

Work Environment & Inclusion

We foster a culture centered on curiosity, empathy, and collaboration. Our global team values diversity and is committed to creating an equitable and accessible workplace for all. We offer inclusive recruitment practices and reasonable accommodations to support candidates through the hiring process. Our policies include benefits such as at least 24 weeks of parental leave globally.

Additional Information

This position is based onsite in Edinburgh with hybrid working flexibility. We invite you to join us and contribute to shaping the future of travel technology.