Director of Data, ML & AI 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 worlds original and leading airport experiences programme. Travellers can access a network of 1500 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 worlds leading payment networks over 1400 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 2200 global colleagues.

Purpose of the Role

As Director of Data ML & AI Engineering you will lead the design delivery and evolution of Collinsons enterprise data and AI engineering platforms. Reporting to the VP of Platform Ecosystem you will shape the technical foundations that empower analytics data science and AI capabilities across the organisation.

You will ensure Collinsons data ML and AI platforms are reliable scalable secure and cost-efficient enabling teams to move from insight to production with speed and confidence. This role blends strategic vision with operational excellence acting as a catalyst for innovation across the business.

Success will be measured by:

• Highly available efficient and scalable data and AI platforms operating at enterprise scale

• Reduced time to production for analytics data science and AI initiatives

• Strong adoption and satisfaction across analytics AI and business teams

• Embedded security governance and compliance by design

• Engaged high-performing teams with clear ownership and accountability

Key Responsibilities

1. Data ML & AI Platform Leadership

• Lead the design and evolution of enterprise-grade data ML and AI engineering platforms covering ingestion transformation feature management model pipelines and deployment.

• Ensure platforms are resilient scalable and production-ready to support both analytics and AI workloads.

• Balance continuous innovation with operational reliability service continuity and business value.

2. Engineering Delivery & Operations

• Lead multiple engineering squads across data platform ML and AI engineering disciplines.

• Establish clear engineering standards ownership models and accountability frameworks.

• Embed modern delivery practices such as DevOps DataOps MLOps and AIOps to improve reliability and speed.

• Champion operational excellence predictable delivery and effective incident management.

3. Enabling Analytics & AI

• Partner with the VP of Analytics and Head of Innovation & AI to align platform capabilities with insight delivery experimentation and AI productisation.

• Provide high-quality governed production-ready data products and shared tools that empower analytics and AI teams.

• Accelerate time to value through automation reusable patterns and scalable platform abstractions.

4. Cost Risk & Governance by Design

• Own and optimise platform total cost of ownership (TCO) driving transparency and sustainable scaling.

• Embed security privacy and governance controls into platform design in partnership with Data Governance Security and Assurance teams.

• Ensure compliance with internal standards and external regulatory or client requirements.

5. Group Enablement & Stakeholder Partnership

• Deliver consistent reliable group-wide data and AI platform services that balance shared capability with local flexibility.

• Build trusted relationships with stakeholders including Analytics Innovation & AI Cloud Security and Operating Company technology leaders.

• Collaborate with the VP of Platform Ecosystem to align data and AI platforms with broader integration and ecosystem strategy.

• Manage strategic vendors and partners supporting platform delivery and operations.

6. Leadership & Capability Building

• Build and retain inclusive high-performing engineering teams with strong technical expertise and clear accountability.

• Coach and develop emerging leaders across data ML and AI engineering.

• Foster a culture that values ownership quality learning and continuous improvement.

Experience and Qualifications

Were looking for someone who brings:

• Senior leadership experience across data platform ML and/or AI engineering in enterprise or federated environments

• Deep understanding of modern cloud-native data platforms large-scale distributed systems and emerging data technologies

• Proven experience delivering and evolving enterprise-scale data and AI platforms from inception to production

• Hands-on knowledge of ML/AI operationalisation including pipelines lifecycle management and experimentation frameworks

• Demonstrated capability managing cost risk security and compliance at scale

• Strong people leadership and team development experience promoting inclusion clarity and accountability

• Ability to translate complex technical concepts into business impact with senior stakeholders

• A collaborative adaptive leadership style that encourages openness trust and curiosity

We welcome applicants from diverse backgrounds and career journeys who are passionate about building the platforms that power analytics and AI at scale.

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).

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