Lead Engineer

Collinson is the global, privately-owned company dedicated to helping the world to travel with ease and confidence. The group offers a unique blend of industry and sector specialists who together provide market-leading airport experiences, loyalty and customer engagement, and insurance solutions for over 400 million consumers.

Collinson is the operator of Priority Pass, the world’s original and leading airport experiences programme. Travellers can access a network of 1,500+ lounges and travel experiences, including dining, retail, sleep and spa, in over 650 airports in 148 countries, helping to elevate the journey into something special. We work with the world’s leading payment networks, over 1,400 banks, 90 airlines and 20 hotel groups worldwide.

We have been bringing innovation to the market since inception – from launching the first independent global VIP lounge access Programme, Priority Pass to being the first to sell direct travel insurance in the UK through Columbus Direct and creating the first loyalty agency of its kind in the travel sector with ICLP. Today we still invest heavily in innovation to ensure that we continue to deliver superior customer experiences.

Key clients include Mastercard, American Express, Cathay Pacific, British Airways, LATAM, Flying Blue, Accor, EasyJet, HSBC, Chase, HDFC.

Our mission is focused on doing good beyond profit, which for us means we seek out opportunities for our people to share in our success and that we give back to the communities and people within which we work.

Never short of ambition, the success of our business is delivered through the diverse and talented team of over 2,200 global colleagues.

As a Lead Engineer, you’ll be the technical backbone of your squad (of around 5-7 engineers) - leading from the front, writing code daily, and setting the standard for high-quality engineering. You’ll work side by side with an Engineering Manager, ensuring your squad is delivering scalable, well-architected software, while collaborating closely with a Product Manager to build and launch new products and services as a partnership.

This is a hands-on role, with a strong focus on designing, coding, and problem-solving. You’ll be the most experienced engineer in the squad, responsible for refining technical requirements, making key architectural decisions, and mentoring engineers to help them grow.

With modern, cloud-native technologies (including Typescript, AWS, GraphQL) and the freedom to approach problems with fresh thinking, you’ll be building greenfield systems from the ground up. Expect to embed AI, automation, and best-in-class engineering practices into everything you develop.

If you love writing great code, solving complex technical challenges, and shaping the direction of a team, this role gives you the autonomy, responsibility, and impact to do just that.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the Design & Development - Architect, build, and deploy scalable, high-performance software solutions, covering both client-side and server-side applications.
• Technical Leadership - Guide the squad in technical decision-making, ensuring the team follows best practices in code quality, design patterns, architecture, security, and performance.
• Hands-On Engineering - Spend most of your time writing and reviewing code, designing APIs, and ensuring high-quality, maintainable software.
• Full Stack Development - Build any necessary user-interfaces in collaboration with our UX team, and develop well-functioning APIs, and services.
• Mentorship & Coaching - Support and mentor engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and technical excellence.
• Cloud & Infrastructure - Deploy and manage applications on AWS using Terraform, Kubernetes, and containerized workloads.
• Quality & Testing - Champion Test-Driven Development (TDD), automated testing, and CI/CD, ensuring deployments are secure and reliable.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience

• Tech stack - We use TypeScript (Node.js & React), AWS (EKS, Lambda, Aurora RDS), Kubernetes, GraphQL, Kafka, Mongo. You’re comfortable with all of these, and have extensive knowledge of JavaScript more generally, the AWS ecosystem, and running containerised applications.
• Past Experience - You are currently a Lead Engineer or Tech Lead, leading a small team of software engineers.
• API & Database Development - You have experience building and running robust, always-on APIs (both RESTful and GraphQL-based) and underlying services/apps including the databases that underpin them.
• Test-Driven Development - You're very familiar with testing frameworks such as Jest and Pact.
• Cloud & DevOps - You can build, deploy and run your systems end-to-end, with no manual configuration or intervention. We use Terraform and Helm.
• CI/CD - You have plenty experience managing and configuring CI/CD pipelines (we use GitHub Actions) for deployments.
• Self-Starter & Problem-Solver - Ability to take a product challenge and develop a working technical solution, balancing pragmatism with engineering excellence.

• Observability Mindset - You believe in measuring everything. You’ve worked with DataDog (or similar) to ensure your team has the necessary visibility into system health.
• Tooling & Collaboration - Comfortable working with Git, Confluence, Jira, and modern engineering workflows.
• Mentorship & Leadership - You’ve mentored engineers at all levels, providing guidance, reviewing designs, and ensuring your team stays on the right track.

Interview Process:

We want our process to be fair and transparent, so it’s only right that we tell you what the various interview stages are:

Stage 1 – We'll do a screener call with our recruitment team, where you can learn a bit more about Collinson, our values and we can confirm what you’re looking for in a new role.

Stage 2 – We'll do a short call with one of our Engineering Managers for around 30 minutes, who will tell you more about the team, our projects and ask questions about your career history and suitability for the role.

Stage 3 – You will do a technical test (at home), and we’ll review your solution and approach to it.

Stage 4 – This is final and main stage, where we’ll meet you for 1h, and you’ll get to spend time with different members of the engineering team including Engineering Manager and the Principal Engineer. We’ll also go through your technical test and ask questions on some of your design decisions, architectural and technical implementation.

Stage 5 - 30 minute discussion with our Head of Architecture & Engineering

Collinson is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes differences in all their forms including: colour, race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, neurodivergence, family status, age, individuals with disabilities and people from all backgrounds, cultures and experiences as we strongly believe this contributes to our on-going success.

We are focused on continually evolving our purpose driven, high performing culture, providing an environment where our people have the opportunity to achieve their full potential and do interesting and meaningful work. Our company values are: Take Action, Do the right thing, One team and Be insight led. These help guide everything we do internally in terms of how we think, act and interact, right through to how we deliver value to our customers and clients.

In your application, please feel free to note which pronouns you use (For example - she/her/hers, he/him/his, they/them/theirs, etc).