Lead Engineer in London

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. In particular, our unique expertise and insight into high earning, frequent travellers allows us to 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.

Role Purpose

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, guiding senior engineers, 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 containerised workloads.
• Quality & Testing - Champion Test-Driven Development (TDD), automated testing, and CI/CD, ensuring deployments are secure and reliable.

Knowledge, Skills, and Experience Required

• 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 of experience managing and configuring CI/CD pipelines (we use GitHub Actions) for deployments.
• 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.
• Self-Starter & Problem-Solver - Ability to take a product challenge and develop a working technical solution, balancing pragmatism with engineering excellence.

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 ongoing 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: Act smarter, Do the right thing, One team and Take Action. 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). If you need any extra support throughout the interview process, then please email us.