Director of Engineering – Travel Tech Architecture

We are seeking a visionary Director of Engineering—a seasoned Solutions Architect and technical leader with deep expertise in travel technology, specifically in architecting and scaling Online Booking Engines (OBEs) and distribution platforms across hotels, air, tours, and activities. This is a senior strategic role that blends hands-on engineering leadership with architectural excellence. You will play a critical role in designing the next-generation travel tech ecosystem, driving the modernization of legacy systems, and spearheading new product initiatives across B2B and B2C verticals. What You’ll Do Architect the Future: Define and drive the architectural vision and technical roadmap across eCommerce, CRM, booking engines, supplier platforms, and internal tooling. Lead with Impact: Build, scale, and mentor a high-performing engineering organization, instilling a culture of technical rigor, ownership, and innovation. Modernize Infrastructure: Lead the reengineering of legacy systems into scalable, modular, cloud-native architectures. Drive Product Delivery: Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, and Business teams to ensure alignment of engineering execution with organizational goals. Implement Best Practices: Champion CI/CD, DevOps, observability, security, and performance optimization at every level of the stack. Scale Platforms: Ensure high availability, robust performance, and API-first architecture to support high-volume, mission-critical travel operations. Required Experience 10+ years in software engineering and solution architecture, with 5+ years in engineering leadership roles. Demonstrated success in building and scaling travel technology platforms, including OBEs, itinerary builders, and group booking systems. Hands-on proficiency with Laravel (PHP) and React (Next.js) in cloud-native environments. Deep understanding of AWS services (Lambda, API Gateway, EventBridge, ECS, RDS, S3, etc.) and serverless architectures. Expertise in microservices, API-first development, and asynchronous processing at scale. Proven experience hiring, managing, and mentoring distributed engineering teams. Strong background in CI/CD, observability (Datadog, CloudWatch), automation, and cloud security. Nice to Have Experience building SaaS or platforms for tour operators, group travel, or DMCs. Familiarity with Plasmic CMS, Laravel Livewire, GraphQL, or advanced caching strategies. Knowledge of ML/AI, LLMs, RAGs, or blockchain applications within travel tech. Frontend performance optimization (Core Web Vitals, accessibility, SEO). Why This Role? This is a rare opportunity to own and lead the engineering strategy of a travel tech ecosystem from the ground up. You’ll work alongside senior leadership, influence core product decisions, and shape a next-generation platform that defines the future of digital travel experiences.