Lead Engineer

Recruiter for this role: Purpose of the job 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, 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 containerized workloads. Quality & Testing - Champion Test-Driven Development (TDD), automated testing, and CI/CD, ensuring deployments are secure and reliable. Knowledge, skills and experience required Tech stack - We use TypeScript (Node.js & React), AWS (EKS, Lambda, Aurora RDS), Kubernetes, GraphQL, Kafka, Mongo. You’re comfortable with all of these, and have extensive knowledge of JavaScript more generally, the AWS ecosystem, and running containerised applications. 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 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. About us: Our story Collinson Group is a global leader in driving loyalty and engagement for many of the world’s largest companies. Predominantly through the provision of travel related benefits within a market leading digital travel ecosystem. The group offers a unique blend of industry and sector specialists who together provide market-leading experience in delivering products and services across four core capabilities: Loyalty, Lifestyle Benefits and Insurance. The group provides unrivalled insight and expertise around affluent consumers and frequent travellers, creating and delivering products and services now accessible to over 400m end consumers. We have more than 25 years’ experience, with 28 global locations, servicing over 800 clients in 170 countries, employing 1,800 people. 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: Visa, 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 1,800 colleagues globally. Equal Opportunities: Our commitment to inclusion 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: Act smarter, 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. If you need any extra support throughout the interview process, then please email us at [email protected] Reward & Benefits: What's in it for me? You can look forward to a competitive salary and benefit plan including but not limited to: Medical & Dental Care Priority Pass Membership Childcare allowance (for children up to 6 years old) Birthday day off Work From Anywhere 8 weeks per year