Lead DevOps Engineer

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.

Lead DevOps Engineer

The Role

As Lead DevOps Engineer youll own the design reliability scalability security and cost efficiency of our production platform - a zero-downtime multi-region AWS environment running Kubernetes and serverless workloads and centralised AI enablement layers at scale. Youll set the technical direction for the DevOps team driving and documenting the platform standards practices and tooling that champion DevEx eases friction and keep our systems resilient and secure.

This is a hands-on leadership role. Youll architect and solve complex infrastructure challenges while mentoring and growing the engineers around you. Youll own our platform SLAs serve as the platform advocate in cross-functional decisions and act as the core authority on resilience cost security and enablement.

Key Responsibilities

• Platform Ownership - Own the end-to-end reliability stability and performance of our production platform. Enforce SLAs across availability security posture and resilience. Drive the measures thresholds and incident response standards the team operates to.

• Zero-Downtime Operations - Run and maintain a multi-region zero-downtime platform. Own deployment strategies (blue/green canary) traffic management and failover patterns that ensure continuous availability under change and failure.

• Security & Compliance - Own the platforms security posture end to end: networking controls IAM KMS secrets management vulnerability management and compliance against frameworks such as PCI DSS v4 and CIS Benchmarks. Work closely with security teams and act as the DevOps authority on audit and risk.

• DR & Business Continuity - Participate in disaster recovery strategy automation execution and continuous improvement.

• TCO & Cost Management - Drive the strategy on platform total cost of ownership providing teams with clear cost-allocation visibility. Drive rightsizing tagging strategy and architectural decisions that balance cost against reliability and developer experience.

• Infrastructure as Code & CI/CD - Set and maintain the standards for IaC (Terraform Terragrunt). Ensure deployments are secure fast and auditable. Raise the bar on automation so routine operational tasks are eliminated not managed.

• Observability - Own the observability strategy across the platform using Datadog. Define what good looks like: SLO/SLA dashboards alerting thresholds runbooks and the feedback loops that let teams act on signals before users feel them.

• Team Leadership & Mentoring - Lead and grow a team of DevOps engineers. Set technical direction conduct design reviews and create an environment where engineers take ownership. Actively mentor and develop less experienced engineers helping them move from task execution to platform thinking.

• AI & Automation - Lead the teams adoption of AI-assisted operations - embedding AI into CI/CD pipelines runbook automation incident response and developer tooling. Define where AI adds real leverage and own its safe integration into the platform.

Your Experience

• Deep expertise with AWS at scale: EKS (Automode) Lambda EC2 RDS/Aurora multi-region networking (VPC Endpoints Transit Gateway Network Firewall WAF API Gateway) security services (IAM KMS Secrets Manager SCPs Security Hub GuardDuty) and AI tooling (Bedrock Agentcore).

• Proven ownership of a production-grade EKS platform with zero-downtime deployments - ArgoCD Istio blue/green and canary strategies are second nature.

• Terraform expert. Youve set the IaC standards for a team not just followed them.

• Automation & CI/CD - Be an authority on CI/CD pipelines to automate fast secure and seamless deployments with a strong emphasis on improving developer experience to automate routine tasks and improve operational efficiency.

• Experience embedding AI into SLDC workflows

• Hands-on DR experience: automated backup multi-region/az failover AWS FIS testing and formal DR exercises with defined RTO/RPO targets.

• Familiarity with security - youve worked within a compliant environment and youre comfortable in security audits and risk conversations. Youre comfortable with security tooling such as CrowdStrike and Rapid7 SIEM/SOC.

• Observability ownership with Datadog (or equivalent) - youve defined SLOs built the dashboards and set the alerting culture.

• Experience leading or mentoring a DevOps team - you can set direction manage technical debt conversations and grow engineers.

• Comfortable with Python Bash Ansible Helm and GitHub Actions.
  

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