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…