Engineering Manager - Fintech, Lodging

ABOUT THE JOB At HTS, we're rebuilding how travelers shop and book trips — and reshaping how hotel distributors, chains, and OTAs monetize flexibility. Hotels CFAR (Cancel For Any Reason) is one of HTS's fastest-growing fintech products: a cancellation service embedded directly into partner booking flows, letting travelers cancel for any reason and receive a refund, no questions asked. It's a B2B2C product — sold through partners, exercised by travelers, and powered by HTS. We're looking for an engineering leader who can do two things at once: run a high-performing product team building durable, scalable systems, and be a credible, partner-facing technical leader who can sit across the table from a partner's CTO, scope an integration, and ship it. WHAT WOULD YOUR DAY-TO-DAY LOOK LIKE This is an AI-era engineering leadership role, and the shape of the job reflects that: - Small team, high leverage. You'll lead a tight team of ~3 engineers max. We're not scaling headcount linearly with scope — we're scaling output through AI tooling, sharper prioritization, and senior engineers operating with more autonomy. - You ship, too. When you're not in partner-facing calls or unblocking the team, you're producing actual artifacts with AI — prototypes, integration scaffolding, technical specs, partner-facing API examples, internal tooling. The bar is "manager who codes with AI," not "manager who reviews PRs from a distance." - Blended roles are the new normal. Engineers on this team have a real voice in product direction, and non-technical partners (PMs, Solutions, even Sales) contribute code in narrow ways with AI assistance. You'll lean into this — coach engineers on product thinking, set guardrails for non-engineer contributions, and treat the org chart as a guideline, not a wall. BEYOND THAT, DAY-TO-DAY LOOKS LIKE: - Lead the architecture, development, and rollout of the Hotels CFAR platform — including offer/pricing/order/exercise APIs, the merchandising and UI SDK layer, synthetic rate bundling, and the exercise/payout infrastructure - Own partner integrations end-to-end: scope technical solutions, lead solutioning calls, design integration patterns, and partner with sales and Solutions to move partners from Discovery → Solutioning → Development → Live - Drive the foundation work that lets us scale: partner management portal, configuration tooling, self-serve onboarding — the infrastructure that decouples partner growth from engineering headcount - Be the senior technical voice in partner conversations — translate between partner engineering teams, our APIs, and our product strategy; own SLAs, performance, and partner-specific requirements - Partner with Product, Risk/Pricing, Ops, and GTM to align engineering output to business outcomes: attach rate, contribution profit, partner launch velocity, and loss ratio - Foster technical excellence — architecture reviews, mentorship, raising the bar on the senior ICs and tech leads on the team AN IDEAL CANDIDATE HAS: - Experience leading engineering teams building B2B/B2B2C platforms with real, named external partners on the other side — not just internal stakeholders - A strong technical background across backend systems (APIs, orchestration, distributed systems), frontend SDKs / embedded UI, and cloud infrastructure - Direct experience as a partner/customer-facing technical leader — running solutioning calls, scoping integrations, owning SLAs, and unblocking deployments - Comfort with fintech, insurance-adjacent, or transactional products — money movement, refunds, pricing engines, contracts, audit trails - Familiarity with the travel distribution landscapes a bonus — booking engines, agent portals, bedbanks, OTAs, PSS/inventory platforms (Sabre, Amadeus), or hotel CRS/chain systems — is a strong plus - Experience with Scala or Java, REST APIs, OAuth2.0, and cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS); frontend exposure (React, JS/TS) for SDK and merchandising work - A collaborative, product-minded ap