Technical Lead (Travel Tech)

Roles & Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end architecture of the platform inventory management, search and booking engine, supplier and agent portals, admin console

• Design and build the payments, wallet and ledger systems; financial correctness is the highest bar in this role

• Integrate third-party travel systems GDS (Amadeus / Sabre / Travelport), airline APIs, hotel bed-bank and XML supplier APIs, channel managers, payment gateways, FX-rate feeds, WhatsApp Business API

• Write production code daily alongside the team, and personally own the most critical modules

• Set up cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), CI/CD pipelines and engineering practices, including AI-assisted development workflows with review guardrails

• Hire, mentor and lead backend, frontend and QA engineers; run sprint planning, code reviews and delivery cadence

• Work with business stakeholders to translate real-world travel-trade workflows into product inventory types, allotments, rate plans, seasonal pricing, group bookings, multi-supplier sourcing and on-request inventory

• Build for multilingual (English + Arabic / RTL) and multi-currency from day one

• Own technical decisions on stack, database design, scalability and security

Preferred candidate profile

• 10–15 years in software engineering, including 3+ years leading a team while remaining hands-on in production code

• Travel technology experience is mandatory — built or worked deeply on OTA / B2B travel platforms, with strong exposure to hotel and package products (room types, allotments, rate plans, cancellation policies) and/or flight systems (GDS / airline APIs, PNR workflows, group bookings)

• Experience with payment systems — gateways, wallets, ledgers, reconciliation, idempotency and audit trails

• Strong backend engineering in Java / Node.js / .NET Core / Python, with PostgreSQL or equivalent RDBMS (transactions, locking, indexing), event-driven systems (Kafka / SQS), Redis and search engines (Elasticsearch / OpenSearch)

• Proven experience consuming and normalising multiple third-party APIs into a unified data model

EDUCATION

B.Tech / B.E. / MCA or equivalent. Relevant experience prioritised over degree.