Director of Engineering - Distribution

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Director of Engineering - Distribution based in United States.** This role offers the opportunity to lead the engineering vision for a critical platform area that connects businesses with customers across the global travel ecosystem. You will shape the technical strategy behind distribution products, integrations, APIs, and customer-facing experiences. As an engineering leader, you will guide teams responsible for building scalable, reliable, and high-performing systems. The position combines architecture ownership, operational excellence, product partnership, and people leadership. You will help modernize complex platforms while enabling faster innovation and stronger partner adoption. This is a high-impact opportunity for an experienced engineering leader passionate about building technology that powers global experiences. ### Accountabilities: The Director of Engineering - Distribution will lead the technical direction, execution, and growth of a broad engineering organization responsible for critical distribution capabilities. This role requires strategic thinking, strong operational leadership, and the ability to build high-performing teams while delivering scalable technology solutions. - Own the technical strategy and architecture for distribution platforms, including partner integrations, affiliate systems, external APIs, content services, and customer-facing booking experiences. - Design scalable, loosely coupled systems that enable rapid innovation while protecting core platforms and ensuring long-term maintainability. - Lead engineering execution across multiple technically diverse systems, balancing immediate business priorities with sustainable architecture decisions. - Establish and improve reliability practices, including SLOs, SLIs, runbooks, observability, monitoring, and incident response processes. - Build dashboards and operational insights that improve visibility into partner performance, adoption, and system health. - Collaborate closely with product, commercial, and business teams to translate strategic goals into technical roadmaps and delivery plans. - Build, mentor, and scale high-performing engineering teams by developing managers, establishing best practices, and fostering accountability. - Recruit and retain exceptional engineering talent while creating an environment focused on collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement. - Encourage responsible adoption of AI-powered tools and modern engineering practices to improve team productivity and effectiveness. - Drive platform modernization initiatives, including evolving legacy systems into scalable and maintainable architectures. ## **Requirements:** The ideal candidate is an experienced engineering leader with a strong background in distributed systems, platform development, and organizational leadership. They should have demonstrated success managing complex technical environments while balancing business growth, reliability, and engineering excellence. - 10+ years of software engineering experience with at least 4 years leading engineering managers or large cross-functional engineering teams. - Proven experience designing, building, and scaling distributed systems, customer-facing platforms, integrations, or complex technology ecosystems. - Strong operational expertise, including SRE practices, observability, incident management, reliability improvements, and system health ownership. - Experience defining technical strategy, architecture direction, and engineering roadmaps aligned with business objectives. - Strong people leadership skills with experience hiring, coaching managers, developing teams, and creating a culture of accountability. - Ability to balance rapid delivery and business growth requirements with long-term architecture, maintainability, and technical debt management. - Experience modernizing…