Principal Engineer - Identity & Privacy

<p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>About Skyscanner</strong><br /><br />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 💻.<br /><br />Joining Skyscanner means becoming part of a global brand that's striving to become the planet's go-to travel hack accessible for all 🌍.<br /><br />Our vision? To be the world's number one travel ally. (Ambitious? 💪Yes, but, hey, that's what got us here).<br /><br />Now, we’re on the lookout for a <strong>Principal Engineer - Identity &amp; Privacy </strong>to help us bring that vision to even more travellers.<br /><br /><strong>About the role</strong><br /><strong>(Hybrid)</strong><br /></p><p style="min-height:1.5em">As our Principal Engineer for Identity &amp; 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.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">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.<br /><br /><strong>What you’ll be doing</strong></p><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Setting our technical strategy:</strong> 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.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Shaping identity at scale:</strong> You’ll lead our technical approach to purpose-scoped identifiers and consent-aware data processing across sessions, tracking, advertising, accounts, consent and derived identifiers.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Connecting the dots end-to-end:</strong> 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.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Turning privacy into engineering practice:</strong> 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.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Leading across Skyscanner:</strong> 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.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Getting hands-on with the big stuff:</strong> 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 guid