Principal Software Engineer

Company

Collinson Group is a global leader in driving loyalty and engagement for many of the world’s largest companies. Predominantly through the provision of travel related benefits within a market leading digital travel ecosystem. The group offers a unique blend of industry and sector specialists who together provide market-leading experience in delivering products and services across four core capabilities: Loyalty, Lifestyle Benefits and Insurance.

The group provides unrivalled insight and expertise around affluent consumers and frequent travellers, creating and delivering products and services now accessible to over 400m end consumers.

We have more than 25 years’ experience, with 28 global locations, servicing over 800 clients in 170 countries, employing 1,800 people.

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: Visa, 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 1,800 colleagues globally.

The Role  

As a Principal Engineer, you’ll be leading the technical direction for a recently kickstarted greenfield initiative, designing and building systems from the ground up. This is an opportunity to shape the foundations of something new, modern, and built the right way.

You’ll set the architectural vision, make high-impact technical decisions, and guide multiple squads towards building scalable, well-engineered software. This is a hands-on role, where you’ll be designing, coding, and solving the toughest technical challenges.

With a modern cloud-native stack and the freedom to approach problems with fresh thinking, you’ll be working at the cutting edge - embedding AI, automation, and best-in-class engineering practices into everything we build.

If you enjoy building new things, defining technical strategy, and working with highly capable teams, this role offers the space and responsibility to do just that.
Key Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership - Own the technical strategy for your pillar, guiding multiple squads towards high-quality, scalable, and well-architected solutions.
• Hands-On Architecture & Development - Lead the design and development of complex, high-scale systems. This means writing real code, building proof-of-concepts, and diving into problem-solving.
• Engineering Consistency - Ensure teams within your initiative follow engineering best practices, write clean and maintainable code, and maintain high standards in security, performance, and observability.
• Mentorship & Coaching - Support and upskill Lead Engineers and squad engineers, helping them grow into their full potential.
• Modern Software Practices - Champion SOLID principles, automated testing, and CI/CD best practices, ensuring deployments are fast, safe, and seamless.
• Observability & Performance - Help teams build highly observable systems using DataDog and other tools, making sure we can see and fix issues before they impact users.
• Collaboration - Work closely with Product Managers, Senior Product Directors, Delivery Managers, and Engineering Managers to ensure our technical approach aligns with business needs.
• Infrastructure & Deployment - Be comfortable working with GitHub Actions, Terraform, Kubernetes, and AWS to ensure our systems are resilient and scalable.
• AI & Future Tech - We want to push the boundaries of AI-driven development - if you have ideas on how to embed AI into our engineering processes, you’ll have the space to explore them.

Knowledge, skills and experience required

• Tech stack - We use TypeScript (Node.js & React), AWS (EKS, Lambda, Aurora RDS), Kubernetes, and GraphQL. 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 have proven experience designing large, distributed, data-driven systems in the cloud, and you’ve ran an engineering team/squad previously.
• Test-Driven Development – You're very familiar with testing frameworks such as Jest and Pact.
• Architecture & Problem Solving - You can architect a system that scales, handles high throughput, and integrates seamlessly with a complex ecosystem.
• CI/CD & Infrastructure as Code - You’ve deployed production systems using Terraform and Helm, and have experience with GitHub Actions as a CI/CD platform.
• Observability Mindset - You believe in measuring everything. You’ve worked with DataDog (or similar) to ensure teams have visibility into system health.
• Mentorship & Leadership - You’ve mentored engineers at all levels, providing guidance, reviewing designs, and ensuring teams stay on the right track.

Interview Process

We want our process to be fair and transparent, so it’s only right that we tell you what the various interview stages are:

Stage 1 - We'll do a screener call with our recruitment team, where you can learn a bit more about Collinson, our values and we can confirm what you’re looking for in a new role.

Stage 2 - We'll do a short call with the VP of Software Engineering for around 30 minutes, who will tell you more about the team, our projects and ask questions about your career history and suitability for the role.

Stage 3 - We'll ask you to do a tech test at home. It will take around an hour.

Stage 4 - This is final and main stage, where we’ll meet you for around 2 hours, and you’ll get to spend time with different members of the engineering team. We’ll talk through your technical test and ask questions about your solution, alongside more job-specific scenarios.

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: Act smarter, 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 [email protected]

We also have our very own Beacons (Domestic Abuse Advisors) supporting within each of our global offices. Our Beacons will be your point of contact if you or someone you know needs support.