Backend Lead Engineer

Collinson is a global loyalty and benefits company.

We use our expertise and products to craft customer experiences which enable some of the worlds best known brands to acquire engage and retain the most demanding and choice-rich 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 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 2000 passionate people working in 20 locations worldwide. Our solutions include Priority Pass the worlds best known airport experiences programme while we are also the trusted partner behind many of the leading financial services airline and hotel brands reward programmes and loyalty initiatives.

Purpose of the job

As a Lead Engineer youll 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. Youll 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. Youll 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 youll 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.

Knowledge skills and experience required

Tech stack - We use TypeScript ( & React) AWS (EKS Lambda Aurora RDS) Kubernetes GraphQL Kafka Mongo. Youre 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 - Youre 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. Youve 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 - Youve 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.