Senior Software Engineer - Cape Town Engineering & Tech · Cape Town ·

Collinson Group; London; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 85,000; Full time

Job summary

Collinson, a leader in loyalty and benefits, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join a cross-functional team. You’ll play a vital role in designing and building cloud-native products, with a focus on quality and scalable software solutions. This position emphasizes collaborative problem-solving, hands-on coding, and mentorship in a modern tech stack utilizing TypeScript.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in software development with focus on TypeScript.
• Experience with AWS and cloud production systems.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions.

Responsibilities

• Write clean, efficient, and testable code for frontend and backend services.
• Deploy and monitor services in AWS using Terraform and Kubernetes.
• Champion automated testing, contributing to robust system performance.

Skills

TypeScript

JavaScript

Cloud Systems

Event-Driven Architecture

Automated Testing

CI/CD

Agile Environment

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

GitHub Actions

Job description

Collinson is a global loyalty and benefits company.

We use our expertise and products to craft customer experiences which enable some of the world’s best known brands to acquire, engage and retain the most demanding and choice-rich customers. In particular, our unique expertise and insight into high earning, frequent travellers allows us to create products and solutions for our clients that inspire greater customer engagement to drive more profitable relationships, enrich their travel experiences, protect what matters and assist in in times of need.

While specialising in Financial Services, Travel and Retail, we also support clients in multiple sectors. We have worked with over 90 airlines, 20 hotel groups and more than 600 financial institutions and banks, with clients including Accor Hotels, Air France KLM, American Express, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Diners Club, Mandarin Oriental, Mastercard, Radisson Hotel Group, Sephora, Visa and Vhi.

We take our more than 30 years’ experience working with these kinds of household names in over 170 countries, and help our clients to deliver the smarter experiences it takes to differentiate their propositions, and help them win deeper devotion with their customers.

Collinson is a privately-owned entrepreneurial business with 2 500 passionate people working in 20 locations worldwide. Our solutions include Lounge Key and Priority Pass, the world’s best known airport experiences programme, while we are also the trusted partner behind many of the leading financial services, airline and hotel brand’s reward programmes and loyalty initiatives.

Purpose of the job

As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll be a key figure in one of our cross-functional teams, designing and building cloud-native, greenfield products from the ground up. You’ll take ownership of features and new capabilities, working closely with a Product Manager, Engineering Manager, and your teammates to deliver high-quality software that is reliable, scalable, and secure.

You’ll be hands-on every day; refining stories, writing code, reviewing pull requests, and solving interesting technical problems. You’ll bring strong engineering practices to the team and help shape the way we build software. While you’re not expected to manage people, your technical depth and experience mean you’ll naturally become a point of reference for others on the team.

We have a modern TypeScript stack, cloud-native environment, containerised deployments, and a strong focus on automation, observability, and AI-enhanced development.

If you enjoy solving complex problems, delivering high-impact features, and being part of a high-trust, high-autonomy engineering culture, we'd love to have you onboard.

Key responsibilities

• Write clean, efficient, and testable code (for both frontend and backend services), owning complex features and services from design to deployment.
  
• Work closely with your squad (PMs, engineers, QAs) to refine requirements, scope technical solutions, and deliver great software.
  
• Champion automated testing and CI/CD. You’ll write unit, integration, and contract tests, and help make our systems robust and reliable.
  
• Build, deploy, and monitor services in AWS using tools like Terraform, Kubernetes, and GitHub Actions.
  
• Take responsibility for the health, performance, and maintainability of the code you ship.
• Help evolve our engineering standards and practices by sharing knowledge, reviewing code, and learning from incidents.
• Champion observability. You’ll be using DataDog to monitor services and debug production issues.
• Look for opportunities to improve development workflows using AI-powered tooling and automation.
• Be a mentor and teacher to less experienced engineers.
• Develop in an Agile environment using tools like Git, Jira, and Confluence, with a mindset of collaboration and continuous improvement.

NON-NEGOTIABLE:

• 5+ years of experience in software development with a strong focus on TypeScript (Node.js & React) and excellent knowledge of JavaScript fundamentals.
  
• Experience building and running production systems on a cloud platform (i.e. AWS and Azure).
  
• Comfortable developing software within an event-driven architecture.
  
• Experience with technical design and solution architecture.
  
• Deep knowledge of writing automated tests and the principles of TDD.
  
• Comfortable building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (we use GitHub Actions) for code deployment primarily using Terraform.
  
• Able to take a problem and run with it, bringing a pragmatic, product-focused approach to software delivery.

Personal Attributes:

• Show initiative: self-driven, independent problem-solver who take ownership end-to-end
  
• Innately curious: constantly questioning, learning, and seeking deeper understanding
  
• Innovative: think outside the box, be creative and implement ideas that enhance our systems - innovation is valued highly at Collinson
  
• Communicative collaborator: share openly, work across teams, and integrate feedback
  
• Strong analytical and investigative problem-solving skills
  
• Hungry and eager to make a difference at a technical and operational level
  
• The ability to get things done – we don’t like micro-management, but we expect you to do the right thing
  
• An attitude of being proud of your code and taking ownership

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.

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 (including a Principal Engineer, a Senior Engineer, and representatives from our Product and Delivery teams). We’ll also go through your technical test, and ask questions on some of your design decisions.