Director of Engineering

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.

Purpose of the job

We're looking for a Director of Engineering to lead the technical delivery of our go-to-market products: the software our Clients, Consumers and Partners use. This covers Priority Pass, LoungeKey, Lounge Pass and the wider airport experiences estate, along with the externally facing APIs, partner integrations, and digital experiences that sit around them.

This is one of two Director roles reporting to the VP of Software Engineering. You're accountable for delivering valuable, reliable software to customers and partners at pace, supporting with defining our engineering standards and culture, and nurturing a capable and efficient engineering team. You'll manage a number of Principal Engineers and Lead Engineers, and work with the Engineering Managers and cross-functional squads inside your pillars.

You set technical direction, raise the standard for architecture, testing and operational readiness, and make sure delivery is visible without drowning teams in reporting. You'll be close enough to the detail to make credible decisions, but you operate through standards, coaching and clear ownership rather than doing the work yourself. Our cloud-native platform is built on AWS, built with TypeScript, React, Node.js, Kubernetes, serverless, GraphQL, Kafka, Postgres and MongoDB. You will be accountable for business-critical, client-facing, operationally sensitive systems. They carry high-volume customer journeys, partner integrations, reservations, payments-adjacent and PCI-sensitive workloads, and integrations with platforms such as Salesforce. You'll be accountable for the resilience and live operation of the services your teams own. Finally, AI will play a key role in your team, and you will bring demonstratable experience of how you’ve improved SDLCs with the use of AI, and will take those learnings forward to your team at Collinson.

Key Responsibilities

Own the technical delivery of the go-to-market products serving Clients, Consumers and Partners, including externally facing APIs, SDKs, partner integrations, and our digital experiences, while balancing delivery pace against long-term engineering quality.

• Set and evolve the technical direction for your team, working with the Platform Manager to keep service boundaries clear, reduce coupling, and stop a distributed monolith forming between product and platform.

• Lead and line-manage your Principal and Lead Engineers, and oversee the engineering squads in your area.

• Embed AI and automation into the SDLC where it removes real friction and improves measurable throughput, not as theatre or another layer of tooling.

• Treat APIs, events and data contracts as products, with proper standards, versioning and lifecycle management.

• Protect business-critical delivery commitments through frequent, reliable, low-risk deployments.

• Raise the quality bar across architecture, code review, automated testing (unit, integration, contract, E2E and performance), BDD and resilience, partnering with the Head of QA so quality is built in from discovery rather than inspected at the end.

• Make resilience, failure modes and recovery paths part of design from the start, and own the observability, on-call and incident response for the customer-facing services your teams run.

• Give senior leadership, product and commercial stakeholders honest, transparent visibility of delivery confidence, technical risk and trade-offs, especially where client commitments are at stake.

• Work with Product and Delivery early, before requirements are thrown over the wall, so squads have the context to make good decisions and move quickly without becoming chaotic.

• Strengthen workforce strategy in your area, including reducing long-term contractor dependency and building sustainable engineering capacity.

Non Negotiable

Has led engineering teams as a Head of Engineering (or equivalent senior leadership role) before, accountable for delivery across multiple squads.

• Proven track record delivering business-critical, client-facing software at scale while protecting delivery commitments.

• Excellent people leadership skills, with a belief that the strongest teams are ones that love coming to work every day.

• Credible technical depth in modern cloud-native architecture on AWS, with hands-on understanding of TypeScript, Node.js, React, Kubernetes, serverless, eventing and modern data stores.

• Comfortable engaging with clients and other external stakeholders at a leadership level for both ongoing and new technical initiatives.

• Track record embedding quality, observability and operational readiness into delivery, and owning incident response for production services.

• Comfortable operating across both executive and technical levels, translating technical reality into clear narratives for senior, product and commercial stakeholders.

• Pragmatic use of AI and automation in the SDLC, with a bias towards measurable impact over hype.

Personal Attributes

• Leads through influence, standards and coaching, while staying close enough to the detail to make credible decisions.

• Direct, thoughtful and pragmatic; challenges complexity, process without value, and teams avoiding ownership.

• Brings confidence and presence, and is comfortable making and standing by difficult decisions under operational pressure.

• Invests in growing Principal and Lead Engineers, building strong teams and clear career paths.

• Articulates delivery risk and trade-offs honestly, even when the message is uncomfortable, and surfaces issues early.

• Cares about outcomes and customers, not elegant diagrams that fall apart in production.

Interview Process

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

• Stage 1: A screener call with our recruitment team, where you can learn more about Collinson and our values, and we can confirm what you're looking for in a new role.

• Stage 2: A call with the VP of Software Engineering for around 45 minutes, covering the role, the transformation we're going through, and your leadership and delivery experience.

• Stage 3: You’ll be asked to create a presentation on a relevant topic, and to present to a wider stakeholder group.

• Stage 4: A final 1:1 in-person meeting with the VP of Software Engineering and the Chief Technology and Data Officer.

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).

If you need any extra support throughout the interview process, then please email us at [email protected]