Lead Engineer, Software Engineer, Cloud Engineer - Software

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 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,+ lounges and travel experiences, including dining, retail, sleep and spa, in over airports in countries, helping to elevate the journey into something special.

We work with the world's leading payment networks, over 1, 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, Easy Jet, 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, 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, Graph

QL) 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 Type Script & React), AWS (EKS, Lambda, Aurora RDS), Kubernetes, Graph
  
  QL, 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…