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 world's best known brands to acquire, engage and retain the most demanding and choice-rich customers. In 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 2,000 passionate people working in 20 locations worldwide. Our solutions include Priority Pass, the world's best known airport experiences programme, while we are also the trusted partner behind many of the leading financial services, airline and hotel brand's reward programmes and loyalty initiatives.

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.

Knowledge, skills and experience required

• Tech stack - We use TypeScript & 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.