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 world’s original and leading airport experiences programme. Travellers can access a network of 1,500+ 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 world’s leading payment networks, over 1,400 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 2,200 global colleagues.

Purpose of the job

We're looking for a 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.

This is one of two Director roles reporting to the VP of Software Engineering. You're 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'll 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'll 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'll 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 demonstratable experience of how you’ve improved SDLCs with the use of AI, and will take those learnings forward to your team at