Director of Engineering

Location: London · Hybrid

Job Description

The Role

We are looking for a Head of/Director of Engineering to lead the technical delivery of our go-to-market products: the software our Clients, Consumers and Partners use. This covers Priority Pass, LoungeKey, Lounge Pass and the wider airport experiences estate, along with the externally facing APIs, partner integrations and digital experiences that sit around them.

You are accountable for delivering valuable, reliable software to customers and partners at pace, supporting with defining our engineering standards and culture, and nurturing a capable and efficient engineering team.

You will manage a number of Principal Engineers and Lead Engineers, and work with the Engineering Managers and cross-functional squads inside your pillars. You set technical direction, raise the standard for architecture, testing and operational readiness, and make sure delivery is visible without drowning teams in reporting. You will be close enough to the detail to make credible decisions, but you operate through standards, coaching and clear ownership rather than doing the work yourself.

Our cloud-native platform is built on AWS, built with TypeScript, React, Node.js, Kubernetes, serverless, GraphQL, Kafka, Postgres and MongoDB.

You will be accountable for business-critical, client-facing, operationally sensitive systems. They carry high-volume customer journeys, partner integrations, reservations, payments-adjacent and PCI-sensitive workloads, and integrations with platforms such as Salesforce. You will be accountable for the resilience and live operation of the services your teams own.

Finally, AI will play a key role in your team, and you will bring demonstrable experience of how you have improved SDLCs with the use of AI, and will take those learnings forward to your team at Collinson.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the technical delivery of the go-to-market products serving Clients, Consumers and Partners, including externally facing APIs, SDKs, partner integrations and our digital experiences, while balancing delivery pace against long-term engineering quality.
• Set and evolve the technical direction for the team, working with the Platform Manager to keep service boundaries clear, reduce coupling, and stop a distributed monolith forming between product and platform.
• Lead and line-manage Principal and Lead Engineers, and oversee the engineering squads in the area.
• Embed AI and automation into the SDLC where it removes real friction and improves measurable throughput, not as theatre or another layer of tooling.
• Treat APIs, events and data contracts as products, with proper standards, versioning and lifecycle management.
• Protect business-critical delivery commitments through frequent, reliable, low-risk deployments.
• Raise the quality bar across architecture, code review, automated testing (unit, integration, contract, E2E and performance), BDD and resilience, partnering with the Head of QA so quality is built in from discovery rather than inspected at the end.
• Make resilience, failure modes and recovery paths part of design from the start, and own the observability, on-call and incident response for the customer-facing services the teams run.
• Give senior leadership, product and commercial stakeholders honest, transparent visibility of delivery confidence, technical risk and trade-offs, especially where client commitments are at stake.
• Work with Product and Delivery early, before requirements are thrown over the wall, so squads have the context to make good decisions and move quickly without becoming chaotic.
• Strengthen workforce strategy in the area, including reducing long-term contractor dependency and building sustainable engineering capacity.

Knowledge, Skills and Behaviours

Essential

• Has led engineering teams as a Head of Engineering (or equivalent senior leadership role) before, accountable for delivery across multiple squads.
• Proven track record delivering business-critical, client-facing software at scale while protecting delivery commitments.
• Excellent people leadership skills, with a belief that the strongest teams are ones that love coming to work every day.
• Credible technical depth in modern cloud-native architecture on AWS, with hands-on understanding of TypeScript, Node.js, React, Kubernetes, serverless, eventing and modern data stores.
• Comfortable engaging with clients and other external stakeholders at a leadership level for both ongoing and new technical initiatives.
• Track record embedding quality, observability and operational readiness into delivery, and owning incident response for production services.
• Comfortable operating across both executive and technical levels, translating technical reality into clear narratives for senior, product and commercial stakeholders.
• Pragmatic use of AI and automation in the SDLC, with a bias towards measurable impact over hype.
• Leads through influence, standards and coaching, while staying close enough to the detail to make credible decisions.
• Direct, thoughtful and pragmatic; challenges complexity, process without value, and teams avoiding ownership.
• Brings confidence and presence, and is comfortable making and standing by difficult decisions under operational pressure.
• Invests in growing Principal and Lead Engineers, building strong teams and clear career paths.
• Articulates delivery risk and trade-offs honestly, even when the message is uncomfortable, and surfaces issues early.
• Cares about outcomes and customers, not elegant diagrams that fall apart in production.

Reward & Benefits: What's in it for me?

We want our people to feel recognised, supported and able to thrive both at work and beyond it.

We offer a competitive reward package designed to support your financial, physical and mental wellbeing, alongside opportunities to learn, develop and be recognised for the contribution you make. Benefits vary by role and location, and full details will be shared as part of the application process.

Equal opportunities: Our commitment to inclusion

Collinson Group is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, identities and experiences, and believe that different perspectives make our business stronger.