Director of Engineering

Description :

Role : Director of Engineering - Flights Platform

AI-First Travel Commerce

High-Scale Distributed Systems

Marketplace Infrastructure

The Problem Space :

A flight search looks trivially simple.

It is anything but.

Every query you fire triggers a choreography of distributed systems operating in real-time - integrating with a dozen airline GDS/NDC providers, computing dynamic fares across inventory buckets and fare rules, ranking thousands of itineraries by relevance and business intent, and returning a ranked, priced, bookable result set - all in under 100ms.

- Millions of search queries per minute

- <100ms end-to-end SLA with external API dependencies

- High-value transactions - a bug here means a missed booking, not a failed render

- Pricing errors erode trust faster than any other failure mode

We are rebuilding the Flights platform as a real-time commerce engine for Bharat AI-native from day zero, built to power both B2C consumer journeys and high-stakes B2B enterprise corridors.

This is a once-in-a-decade opportunity to build national-scale flight infrastructure from first principles.

What You Will Own :

You will own the full Flights platform - systems, architecture, and the teams that build them.

Core System Domains :

- Search Systems : High-throughput, low-latency query pipelines returning ranked, bookable options

- Pricing & Fare Engine : Dynamic pricing logic, fare rules, promotional overlays, and real-time validation

- Booking & Ticketing : Transaction-critical flows requiring strict consistency, idempotency, and zero data loss

- Airline Integrations : Managing unreliable external GDS/NDC APIs with retries, circuit-breakers, and reconciliation

- Post-Booking Flows : Cancellations, modifications, refunds - correctness at the margin is non-negotiable

Platform Scope :

- High-scale APIs serving consumer apps, B2B enterprise clients, and third-party partners

- Event-driven state machines managing booking workflows across async boundaries

- Observability and reliability infrastructure across all mission-critical flows

Team Scope :

- Lead 15 30+ engineers across multiple product and platform teams

- Manage Engineering Managers and Principal/Staff engineers

- Own hiring, org design, and technical direction

Core Engineering Challenges :

- This role is fundamentally about making the right trade-offs under uncertainty at scale.

- Latency vs. Accuracy : when do you serve a cached fare vs. call a live airline API?

- Availability vs. Consistency : graceful degradation at booking time vs. strict price validation

- Cost vs. Performance : when is an external API call worth it vs. a cache hit?

- Scalability vs. Simplicity : the best system is the one your team can reason about under incident

AI-First Engineering :

AI is not an afterthought.

It is load-bearing architecture.

- LLM-powered pricing intelligence dynamic fare prediction and demand signals

- RAG pipelines for fare rules, refund policy, and support automation

- Agentic booking resolution workflows autonomous exception handling at scale

- MCP-based orchestration layers for multi-provider integration

Key Responsibilities :

Architecture & Distributed Systems :

- Design and evolve sub-100ms distributed query systems serving millions of concurrent searches

- Build fault-tolerant booking pipelines with strong consistency and durability guarantees

- Drive Kafka-based event architectures for booking state management

Reliability & Observability :

- Own 99.99%+ availability for booking and pricing systems

- Build deep observability - metrics, distributed tracing, structured logging, SLOs/SLAs

- Lead post-incident reviews and drive systemic reliability improvements

Business Partnership :

- Partner with Product, Revenue, and Partnerships to translate commercial goals into architecture

- Influence platform roadmap, supplier strategy, and long-term technical investment

Technology Stack :

- Backend : Java /Kotlin / Go

- Architecture : Microservices Event-Driven (Kafka) gRPC

- Data : Redis Aerospike DynamoDB Elasticsearch

- Cloud : AWS (EKS, EC2, S3)

- Observability : Prometheus Grafana OpenTelemetry

Who You Are :

- 10 - 16 years in backend/distributed systems; led teams of 1550 engineers

- Built and scaled large B2C + B2B platforms - Travel Tech, FinTech, or high-scale Consumer

- Deep expertise in real-time systems, marketplace dynamics, and external API integration

- Tier-I institute background strongly preferred (IIT / IIIT / NIT / IISC / BITS CSE/ISE)

Why This Matters :

- Build national-scale infrastructure for 1.4 billion people

- Sit at the intersection of AI distributed systems marketplace economics

- Define the future of travel commerce in India - from architecture to product