Principal Engineer - Identity & Privacy

About Skyscanner Everyone loves travelling, but planning is not without its challenges ✈️. That's why we've spent 20 years building tools that turn travel-planning chaos into a breeze. Today, around 160 million travellers count on us every month to skip the whole “47 browser tabs open” phase and find flights, cars, and hotels quickly and easily 💻. Joining Skyscanner means becoming part of a global brand that's striving to become the planet's go-to travel hack accessible for all 🌍. Our vision? To be the world's number one travel ally. (Ambitious? 💪Yes, but, hey, that's what got us here). Now, we’re on the lookout for a Principal Engineer - Identity & Privacy to help us bring that vision to even more travellers. About the role (Hybrid) As our Principal Engineer for Identity & Privacy, you’ll shape the technical foundations that help us earn traveller trust while safely unlocking the data and AI capabilities behind brilliant product, personalisation, experimentation and advertising experiences. This is a senior technical leadership role with impact right across Skyscanner. You’ll own the technical strategy and set standards for identity, consent and privacy engineering across our traveller-facing products, data platforms and operational systems — spanning web, app, backend, experimentation, analytics, advertising and machine learning. What you’ll be doing • Setting our technical strategy: You’ll define and communicate the long-term vision and roadmap for identity, consent and privacy engineering, aligning it with our product strategy, traveller trust goals and data and AI ambitions. • Shaping identity at scale: You’ll lead our technical approach to purpose-scoped identifiers and consent-aware data processing across sessions, tracking, advertising, accounts, consent and derived identifiers. • Connecting the dots end-to-end: You’ll establish how identity and consent state flows from web and app surfaces through backend services, event streams and data pipelines to downstream consumers — making a complicated ecosystem feel a lot less complicated. • Turning privacy into engineering practice: You’ll translate privacy principles and legal guidance into reusable engineering patterns, platform controls, decision frameworks and measurable standards, including clear expectations around retention, deletion, masking, access control and auditability. • Leading across Skyscanner: You’ll partner with Engineering, Product, Legal, Privacy, Security, Data Governance, Data Science, Marketing, Ads and Analytics to navigate trade-offs, create clarity and turn ambiguous problems into decisions teams can deliver against. • Getting hands-on with the big stuff: You’ll provide technical leadership for large-scale initiatives spanning consent platform capabilities, privacy-safe experimentation, data retention and deletion, and traveller-trust features, while guiding teams towards simple, scalable, reliable and cost-effective solutions. • Raising the engineering bar: You’ll use observability, engineering health and incident learnings to improve how we operate, while coaching and mentoring engineers and championing high standards, constructive challenge and inclusive collaboration across our Engineering community. About you • Privacy-engineering experienced: You’ve translated privacy and data-protection requirements — including GDPR, PECR, CCPA/CPRA or equivalent global frameworks — into practical engineering decisions, working effectively with Legal, Privacy, Security and Data Governance partners. • Built for scale: You’ve designed, built and operated large-scale distributed systems across identity, data platforms or adjacent areas such as consent, authentication, advertising technology or customer data infrastructure. • An influential tech