Principal Software Engineer

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 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 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. 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.

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.


Technical Leadership - Own the technical strategy for your pillar, guiding multiple squads towards high-quality, scalable, and well-architected solutions.
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.

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.
Mentorship & Leadership - You’ve mentored engineers at all levels, providing guidance, reviewing designs, and ensuring teams stay on the right track.

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.

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.

We also have our very own Beacons (Domestic Abuse Advisors) supporting within each of our global offices.