Platform Engineering Manager 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. 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.

Collinson is a global loyalty and benefits company. We use our expertise and products to craft customer experiences which enable some of the world's best-known brands to acquire, engage and retain the most demanding and choice-rich customers. Our unique expertise and insight into high earning, frequent travellers help us create products and solutions for our clients that inspire greater customer engagement to drive more profitable relationships, enrich their travel experiences, protect what matters and assist in times of need.

While specialising in Financial Services, Travel and Retail, we also support clients in multiple sectors. We have worked with over 90 airlines, 20 hotel groups and more than 600 financial institutions and banks, with clients including Accor Hotels, Air France KLM, American Express, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Diners Club, Mandarin Oriental, Mastercard, Radisson Hotel Group, Sephora, Visa and Vhi.

We take our 30 years' experience working with these kinds of household names in over 170 countries and help our clients to deliver the smarter experiences it takes to differentiate their propositions and help them win deeper devotion with their customers.

Collinson is a privately-owned entrepreneurial business with 2,000 passionate people working in 20 locations worldwide. Our solutions include Priority Pass, the world's best known airport experiences programme, while we are also the trusted partner behind many of the leading financial services, airline and hotel brand's reward programmes and loyalty initiatives.

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.

Collinson Insurance is a niche, personal lines insurer generating 400m+ GWP operating as two insurance companies in the UK and Malta. Our major product lines are travel insurance, private medical & dental insurance, and specialist insurance products including gadget, warranties, events, and home and motor ancillary products. With long standing agreements and strong relationships with affinity clients such as the Post Office, EasyJet and Saga in the UK and Vhi in Ireland, we also operate a direct-to-consumer brand, Columbus Direct which operates as a travel insurer in the UK and Italy.

Collinson Insurance drives primarily short tail, higher utilisation, niche insurance products and provides deep expertise for in-house claims and assistance servicing for travel and health products and works with strategic 3rd parties for its claims and assistance activities covering all other specialty insurance products. The Insurance executive team have an ambitious growth strategy to continue to expand profitably while ensuring equal focus on delivering this in an efficient and effective way across the key enabling functions as the business continues to scale and diversify across products and geographies.

Purpose of the Role

The Platform Engineering Manager is responsible for the shared technology platforms, cloud services, platform tooling and operational capabilities for the Insurance technology estate. The role leads Platform Engineering across the Insurance technology estate, providing the platforms, tooling and operational capabilities that enable secure, reliable software delivery. The role provides leadership for the Platform Engineering chapter and supports the development of DevOps Engineers across the Insurance technology estate, promoting consistent platform practices and engineering standards.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and operate shared platform services, cloud platforms and platform tooling, ensuring they remain reliable and maintain uptime within agreed service levels.
• Oversee third party platform suppliers and service providers ensuring effective Service Delivery and adherence to agreed service levels and that they remain compliant to regulatory expectations.
• Lead platform operations, observability, incident management, root cause analysis, annual disaster recovery testing and operational resilience activities.
• Manage platform lifecycle activities, including technical debt reduction, end of support risks and continual service improvement.
• Manage and reduce vulnerabilities identified by automated and manual security testing.
• Define and maintain platform engineering standards and approved tooling, providing technical leadership and guidance to DevOps Engineers.
• Ensure platform services and platform tooling remain aligned with approved Enterprise Architecture standards and technology roadmap.

Security Engineering

• Embed Secure-by-Design principles and secure engineering practices across platform services, engineering tooling and Engineering teams.
• Ensure platform services, engineering tooling and third-party platform solutions are implemented and operated in accordance with approved security policies, standards and control frameworks.
• Work with Security team on vulnerability remediation, platform hardening and security improvement initiatives.
• Ensure platform services provide appropriate security, monitoring, logging and auditability capabilities.
• Support security assurance, audit and remediation activities relating to platform services and engineering tooling.

Leadership

• Lead and support Platform Engineering chapter members through coaching, performance management and career development.
• Provide guidance and mentoring to DevOps Engineers embedded within product teams, supporting consistent engineering practices and capability development.
• Support recruitment, onboarding and retention activities within the Platform Engineering chapter.
• Encourage knowledge sharing, collaboration and continuous improvement across Platform Engineering and wider engineering teams.
• Maintain visibility of team capacity, skills development needs and operational risks.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability and engineering professionalism.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience Required

Essential Experience

• Leading a Platform Engineering, DevOps, Cloud Operations or Infrastructure Engineering team.
• Operating and supporting cloud platforms and technology services within a production environment.
• Managing service reliability, incident response, operational resilience and continual service improvement activities.
• Implementing and supporting Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD pipelines, automation tooling and engineering enablement practices.
• Evaluating, implementing or supporting AI-enabled engineering capabilities, including developer productivity tooling, automation solutions across engineering teams.
• Working with third-party technology suppliers and managed service providers.
• Supporting secure engineering practices and collaborating with Security, Architecture and Engineering teams.
• Coaching and developing engineers within either direct or matrix management structures.

Technical Knowledge

• AWS and/or Azure cloud platforms.
• Infrastructure as Code and automation tooling.
• CI/CD platforms and developer productivity tooling.
• Observability, monitoring and operational reporting practices.
• Secure engineering and security-by-design principles.
• Incident management, operational resilience and disaster recovery concepts.
• AI-assisted software engineering practices and the application of AI agents within DevOps, SecOps, FinOps and operational support workflows.
• Modern Platform Engineering, DevOps and cloud operations practices.

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.

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