Lead AWS DevOps Engineer in London

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.

As Lead DevOps Engineer, you'll own the design, reliability, scalability, security, and cost efficiency of our production platform - a zero-downtime, multi-region AWS environment running Kubernetes and serverless workloads and centralised AI enablement layers at scale. You'll set the technical direction for the DevOps team, driving and documenting the platform standards, practices, and tooling that champion DevEx, eases friction and keep our systems resilient and secure.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You’ll architect and solve complex infrastructure challenges while mentoring and growing the engineers around you. You'll own our platform SLAs, serve as the platform advocate in cross-functional decisions, and act as the core authority on resilience, cost, security, and enablement.

Key Responsibilities

• Platform Ownership - Own the end-to-end reliability, stability, and performance of our production platform. Enforce SLAs across availability, security posture, and resilience.
• Zero-Downtime Operations - Run and maintain a multi-region, zero-downtime platform. Own deployment strategies (blue/green, canary), traffic management, and failover patterns that ensure continuous availability under change and failure.
• Security & Compliance - Own the platform's security posture end to end: networking controls, IAM, KMS, secrets management, vulnerability management, and compliance against frameworks such as PCI DSS v4 and CIS Benchmarks.
• DR & Business Continuity - Participate in disaster recovery strategy, automation, execution and continuous improvement.
• TCO & Cost Management - Drive the strategy on platform total cost of ownership, providing teams with clear cost-allocation visibility.
• Infrastructure as Code & CI/CD - Set and maintain the standards for IaC (Terraform, Terragrunt). Ensure deployments are secure, fast, and auditable.
• Observability - Own the observability strategy across the platform using Datadog.
• Team Leadership & Mentoring - Lead and grow a team of DevOps engineers. Set technical direction, conduct design reviews, and create an environment where engineers take ownership.
• AI & Automation - Lead the team's adoption of AI-assisted operations.

Your Experience

• Deep expertise with AWS at scale: EKS (Automode), Lambda, EC2, RDS/Aurora, multi-region networking.
• Proven ownership of a production-grade EKS platform with zero-downtime deployments.
• Terraform expert.
• Automation & CI/CD - Be an authority on CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience embedding AI into SLDC workflows.
• Hands-on DR experience.
• Familiarity with security.
• Observability ownership with Datadog (or equivalent).
• Experience leading or mentoring a DevOps team.
• Comfortable with Python, Bash, Ansible, Helm, and GitHub Actions.

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.

In your application, please feel free to note which pronouns you use. If you need any extra support throughout the interview process, then please email us at ukrecruitment@collinsongroup.com.