Key Responsibilities

Leadership & People Management

• Lead, coach, and mentor a team of data engineers, focusing on career growth, learning, and engagement.
• Take ownership of people management, including development plans, performance reviews, and progression pathways.
• Partner with the Principal Data Engineer to balance technical depth with delivery accountability, ensuring the team excels in both.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, inclusion, and innovation within the data engineering function.

Technical Delivery & Execution

• Oversee the design and implementation of scalable, high-quality data pipelines on AWS and Snowflake.
• Collaborate with the Principal Data Engineer on technical architecture and standards, ensuring solutions are future-proof and cost-efficient.
• Drive adoption of best practices in data engineering, CI/CD, and agile delivery.
• Ensure compliance with governance, security, and data quality requirements.
• Continuously optimize data flows to support business analytics, personalization, and advanced data products.

Strategic Influence & Stakeholder Engagement

• Work with Product Owners, Data Governance, and Analytics teams to align engineering work to strategic data goals.
• Communicate progress and solutions effectively to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Represent data engineering in cross-functional forums, advocating for modern, reliable, and business-enabling data solutions.
• Contribute to shaping the Data & Analytics roadmap, ensuring scalability for future growth.

Knowledge, skills and experience required

Leadership & People Development

• Proven experience leading and developing high-performing data engineering teams, ideally across hybrid or distributed environments.
• Strong focus on people management — setting clear expectations, supporting individual growth, and ensuring structured career progression.
• Ability to foster a culture of learning, inclusion, and psychological safety, empowering engineers to innovate and take ownership.
• Skilled in coaching engineers of varying experience levels, providing both technical mentorship and constructive feedback.
• Experience partnering with a Principal Data Engineer or equivalent to maintain balance between technical excellence and delivery execution.

Technical Expertise

• Deep understanding of modern data architecture patterns - Data Lake, Data Warehouse, Lakehouse, and Data Mesh.
• Proven experience designing and delivering cloud data platforms (preferably AWS and Snowflake).
• Expertise in ETL/ELT development, orchestration, and data automation using tools such as AWS Glue, Step Functions, Airflow, or dbt.
• Strong programming proficiency in Python and SQL, with experience in testing, optimisation, and CI/CD integration.
• Experience with streaming and event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis).
• Knowledge of infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and data observability best practices.
• Strong background in data modelling (dimensional, canonical, and semantic models) to support analytical and operational use cases.
• Understanding of data governance, security, and privacy principles, including GDPR compliance, data lineage, and access controls.

Delivery & Execution

• Demonstrated success delivering data solutions using Agile methodologies (Scrum/Kanban).
• Skilled at balancing speed, quality, and cost, with awareness of cloud resource efficiency and cost management.
• Experienced in leading both strategic transformation projects (platform migrations, architecture redesigns) and incremental delivery improvements (pipeline tuning, automation).
• Confident in aligning technical delivery with business needs and collaborating closely with Product, Analytics, and Governance teams.
• Strategic & Communication Skills
• Excellent communicator — able to explain complex technical solutions in clear, accessible language.
• Strong influencing skills to drive adoption of modern data practices and data-driven decision-making across the business.
• Strategic thinker who connects engineering initiatives with business value, supporting innovation and scalability.
• High accountability, resilience, and adaptability in a fast-moving environment.

About us: Our story

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.

Reward & Benefits: What's in it for me?

You can look forward to a competitive salary and benefit plan including but not limited to:

• Hybrid work arrangement (work from home/office)
• 26 calendar days Annual Leave
• Health Insurance
• Maternity leave (6 months- Paid)
• Paternity leave (15 days- Paid)

Equal Opportunities: Our commitment to inclusion

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.

If you need any extra support throughout the interview process, then please email us at recruitment@collinson.com