Lead Engineer

Collinson is a global loyalty and benefits company, partnering with many of the world’s best‑known brands to create customer experiences that help them acquire, engage and retain choice‑rich customers. With more than 30 years of experience in over 170 countries and 2 500 colleagues in 20 locations worldwide, Collinson delivers smarter, more personal experiences that deepen customer loyalty for leading airlines, hotels, financial institutions and retailers.

About Collinson

Collinson specialises in Financial Services, Travel and Retail, and also supports clients across multiple sectors, working with over 90 airlines, 20 hotel groups and more than 600 financial institutions and banks. Clients include Accor Hotels, Air France KLM, American Express, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Diners Club, Mandarin Oriental, Mastercard, Radisson Hotel Group, Sephora, Visa and Vhi, and solutions include Lounge Key and Priority Pass, the world’s best‑known airport experiences programmes, as well as many leading reward and loyalty initiatives.

We're now growing our team in Poland and want to be upfront about how this role is structured. As we don't yet have a legal entity in Poland, we work with an Employer of Record (EOR) or umbrella company to onboard talent in the region. This means the role is offered on a 2 year fixed term basis via an international contractor agreement — and is fully remote.

Role purpose

As a Lead Engineer, you will be the senior technical voice in a cross‑functional squad of around 5–7 engineers, setting the standard for inclusive, high‑quality engineering. You will partner closely with an Engineering Manager and Product Manager to design, build and ship well‑architected, scalable products and services that delight customers and create measurable business impact.

This is a hands‑on leadership role. You will spend much of your time designing solutions, writing and reviewing code, and guiding technical decisions, while also mentoring engineers and creating a supportive environment where people with different backgrounds can grow.

What you’ll do

• Lead the end‑to‑end design and development of scalable, high‑performance software across both client‑side and server‑side applications.
• Provide technical leadership for your squad, facilitating sound engineering decisions and promoting best practices in code quality, architecture, security and performance.
• Write and review production code every day, design and evolve APIs, and ensure solutions are robust, maintainable and well tested.
• Work across the full stack, collaborating with UX to build user interfaces and developing reliable APIs and services that power our products.
• Mentor and coach engineers at all levels, encouraging continuous learning, constructive feedback and knowledge sharing within the team.
• Design, deploy and operate cloud‑native applications on AWS using Terraform, Kubernetes and containerised workloads.
• Champion automated testing, TDD and CI/CD so that deployments are secure, reliable and frequent, with minimal manual intervention.

Our tech environment

• TypeScript (Node.js and React), with strong JavaScript fundamentals.
• AWS (including EKS, Lambda, Aurora RDS), Kubernetes and container‑oriented architectures.
• GraphQL, REST, Kafka, MongoDB and relational databases.
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform and Helm, and CI/CD with GitHub Actions.
• Observability tools such as DataDog (or similar) to monitor and improve system health.
• Modern collaboration and documentation tools such as Git, Confluence and Jira.

What you’ll bring

• Experience as a Lead Engineer or Tech Lead, guiding a small team or squad to deliver high‑quality software.
• Strong full‑stack engineering skills, including designing, building and supporting robust APIs (REST and GraphQL) and the databases that underpin them.
• Deep experience with automated testing and TDD using tools such as Jest and Pact.
• Ability to design, build, deploy and run systems end to end in the cloud, without relying on manual configuration.
• A collaborative leadership style, with a track record of mentoring engineers, reviewing designs and helping teams make thoughtful trade‑offs.
• A pragmatic, problem‑solving mindset: you can take a product challenge, explore options with partners, and shape a practical, elegant technical solution.

How Collinson supports you

• A people‑centred, flexible culture where hybrid and adaptable working patterns can be discussed to support different life stages and responsibilities.
• A commitment to inclusive recruitment and development, valuing diverse perspectives and creating an environment where everyone can belong and progress.
• Opportunities to work on greenfield systems, adopt AI and automation, and grow your career through challenging work, learning and collaboration with global teams.

If you are excited about leading a squad, enjoy solving complex problems with modern cloud technologies and want to help shape products used by millions of travellers and customers worldwide, Collinson would love to hear from you. Even if you do not meet every single requirement, you are encouraged to apply.

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 one of our Engineering Managers 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 – You will do a technical test (at home), and we’ll review your solution and approach to it.

Stage 4 – This is final and main stage, where we’ll meet you for 1h, and you’ll get to spend time with different members of the engineering team including Engineering Manager and the Principal Engineer. We’ll also go through your technical test and ask questions on some of your design decisions, architectural and technical implementation.

Stage 5 - 30 minute discussion with our Head of Architecture & Engineering