Minimum qualifications

• Experience assembling, managing, and growing multifunctional technology teams

• Experience building large scale solutions with high performance and throughput

• Excellent written and spoken communication skills

• Experience gathering business requirements, formulating metrics and building reports

• Understanding of data architecture, access patterns, relational / non-relational database concepts, data modeling and application implementations

• Experience with AWS or Google Cloud Platform

Preferred qualifications 

• Backend development experience with Scala, Java and / or Python

• Experience within the travel industry

• Hands on experience designing and implementing microservices architectures

About the job

The Hopper Cloud team is building a world class travel distribution product on top of our core Hopper travel and fintech products. The Director of Engineering will own the technology of the Hopper Cloud product as it develops into a full scale saas platform. They will hire and develop teams of engineers to build, operate, and evolve the products that power Hopper Cloud. They will work closely with other Engineering leaders to work through technological and operational dependencies to ensure the success of the team’s roadmap. They will work with the product and business leaders to build product roadmaps and define work streams.

Working with business owners, product managers, UX, and data science, they will be responsible for aligning the Hopper Cloud technology platform to the greater business need.

Responsibilities

Technology platform and product innovation:

Set technology direction. Implement the product-development narrative framework inside the organization, contribute to its advancement and tailor it to the needs of the business unit to ensure that the company’s objectives are met.

Set standards and drive cadence. The engineering leader sets the standards and upholds them. This takes on various aspects like conducting roadmap reviews, providing feedback on prioritization, scoping and specs.

Dive deep. It’s a safe bet to assume that at any given time some part of the organization will be in a partial state of failure. So diving deep to personally drive results is as critical as it is in roles lower on the chain.

Take a longer view. The engineering leader must be able to see around the corner to create compelling outcomes 12-24 months down the line.

Deliver results. The technology-led verticals inside the business unit must produce real and tangible benefits for the business unit itself. We don’t pursue things that don’t contribute to our objectives to grow revenue, increase speed or please our customers and our leaders don’t confuse process with business objectives.

Identify and act on opportunities. Uncover new areas of opportunity, write narratives on these opportunities and establish new tech teams to execute against the opportunities.

Run third-party vendor selection. Hopper needs to evolve its culture to be third-party first for technology solutions and first-party only if an incredibly compelling business reason exists.

People and organization:

Recruit and retain. Build teams of engineers, recruit talented individuals, define and implement career growth opportunities.

Build a culture of performance management. Hold the teams to high standards through the implementation of performance management and ensure that they push this culture down into their organization, as well.

Maintain cultural alignment. The leader of engineering must ensure that there is cultural alignment between the engineering groups and others inside the verticals and ultimately between the business unit and the organization at large.

Act as the coordination layer. Horizontally between verticals to ensure that the groups are productive and working towards shared objectives. Also, with the engineering leaders of other business units and especially with the engineering-led Platform business unit to ensure that company-wide technology outcomes and best practices are being shared.

Facilitate speed and autonomy. Write and develop new frameworks, tools and processes that can be used by the business unit and elsewhere inside the organization to further advance our product-development capabilities.

Develop the team. The goal here is to develop technical leaders to help them grow revenue faster. This is accomplished with coaching, career development, training and the implementation of organizational frameworks.

Responsibilities - Technology platform and product innovation:

• Set technology direction. Implement the product-development narrative framework inside the organization, contribute to its advancement and tailor it to the needs of the business unit to ensure that the company’s objectives are met.
• Set standards and drive cadence. The engineering leader sets the standards and upholds them. This takes on various aspects like conducting roadmap reviews, providing feedback on prioritization, scoping and specs.
• Dive deep. It’s a safe bet to assume that at any given time some part of the organization will be in a partial state of failure. So diving deep to personally drive results is as critical as it is in roles lower on the chain.
• Take a longer view. The engineering leader must be able to see around the corner to create compelling outcomes 12-24 months down the line.
• Deliver results. The technology-led verticals inside the business unit must produce real and tangible benefits for the business unit itself. We don’t pursue things that don’t contribute to our objectives to grow revenue, increase speed or please our customers and our leaders don’t confuse process with business objectives.
• Identify and act on opportunities. Uncover new areas of opportunity, write narratives on these opportunities and establish new tech teams to execute against the opportunities.
• Run third-party vendor selection. Hopper needs to evolve its culture to be third-party first for technology solutions and first-party only if an incredibly compelling business reason exists.

Responsiblities - People and organization

• Recruit and retain. Build teams of engineers, recruit talented individuals, define and implement career growth opportunities.
• Build a culture of performance management. Hold the teams to high standards through the implementation of performance management and ensure that they push this culture down into their organization, as well.
• Maintain cultural alignment. The leader of engineering must ensure that there is cultural alignment between the engineering groups and others inside the verticals and ultimately between the business unit and the organization at large.
• Act as the coordination layer. Horizontally between verticals to ensure that the groups are productive and working towards shared objectives. Also, with the engineering leaders of other business units and especially with the engineering-led Platform business unit to ensure that company-wide technology outcomes and best practices are being shared.
• Facilitate speed and autonomy. Write and develop new frameworks, tools and processes that can be used by the business unit and elsewhere inside the organization to further advance our product-development capabilities.
• Develop the team. The goal here is to develop technical leaders to help them grow revenue faster. This is accomplished with coaching, career development, training and the implementation of organizational frameworks.

Benefits

• Well-funded and proven startup with large ambitions, competitive salary and stock options
• Unlimited PTO
• WeWork All Access Pass OR Work-from-home stipend
• Entrepreneurial culture where pushing limits and taking risks is everyday business
• Open communication with management and company leadership
• Small, dynamic teams = massive impact
• 100% employer paid medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance plans
• Access to a 401k 

More about Hopper

Today, Hopper is best known as a travel app. We're going to do about $1B in sales this year and weathered the COVID storm better than anyone expected. We just raised $170M from Goldman Sachs and Capital One, and inked a deal to be the exclusive travel provider for Capital One Travel.

We owe our success, in large part, to a proprietary suite of data-driven and risk-based financial services that we have developed that complement a customer's trip-purchasing experience. One example is Price Freeze, where our customers are able to purchase a financial option in the app to lock in any price that they see, on any item, for as short as 1 hour or as long as 21 days with Hopper taking the risk on the other side of the trade.

Now we're laying the groundwork for continued expansion in 2021 by adding great people to our team who can help us compete with the travel giants.

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