Data Engineering Manager

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.

Are you a Data Leader who thrives on building high-performing teams, delivering impactful solutions fast, and nurturing a culture of innovation and growth? We’re looking for a Data Engineering Manager who brings both technical depth and inspirational leadership to guide our team in building world-class data products.

In this role, you won’t just be managing a team, you'll be shaping the future of how we deliver value through data. You’ll partner closely with our Principal Data Engineer to drive engineering excellence while mentoring a talented group of engineers through exciting technical challenges.

What you will do:

People Leadership & Team Development

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of skilled data engineers.
• Drive career development, engagement, and learning through clear expectations and individual growth plans.
• Build an inclusive, collaborative culture that fosters innovation and ownership.
• Balance technical leadership with delivery accountability, ensuring your team thrives both personally and professionally.

Technical Delivery & Execution

• Oversee the development of robust, scalable data pipelines on AWS and Snowflake.
• Support architectural decisions and enforce best practices in data engineering, automation, CI/CD, and agile delivery.
• Ensure compliance with data governance, security, and privacy requirements.
• Continuously improve data flows to support analytics, personalization, and intelligent data products.

Strategic Influence & Stakeholder Engagement

• Align engineering delivery with business objectives by working closely with Product, Analytics, and Data Governance teams.
• Communicate technical decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Advocate for reliable, scalable, and modern data solutions across the organization.
• Contribute to our broader Data & Analytics strategy and ensure scalability for future growth.

What you will do:

Leadership & People Development

• Proven track record of managing high-performing, distributed data engineering teams.
• Passion for coaching, mentoring, and creating structured career pathways.
• Strong ability to foster a psychologically safe, empowering team environment.
• Comfortable partnering with technical leaders to ensure balanced focus on innovation and delivery.

Technical Expertise

• Deep knowledge of modern data architectures (Data Lake, Lakehouse, Data Mesh).
• Strong experience with cloud platforms — ideally AWS and Snowflake.
• Hands-on proficiency with Python, SQL, and tools like Airflow, dbt, or AWS Glue.
• Experience with event-driven systems (Kafka, Kinesis), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), and data observability.
• Background in data modeling and building scalable, maintainable solutions.

Execution & Strategy

• Experience delivering data solutions in Agile environments (Scrum, Kanban).
• Skilled in balancing speed, quality, and cost efficiency in cloud environments.
• Excellent communicator and collaborator, capable of influencing and aligning cross-functional stakeholders.
• Strategic thinker who connects engineering work to business impact.

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]