Head of Engineering

Travelpayouts: Technology

Travelpayouts is a platform that helps earn money from travel content, and is part of the Aviasales group of companies. We have become leaders in Russia and are developing our business in Asia, North America, Europe, and other regions. International markets generate more than half of our revenue.

We are looking for a Head of Engineering. The main task is to prepare the engineering organization and technologies for the growth in the number of products and teams.

Why we are opening the role

This is the first time we are establishing a leadership role that will be responsible for the development of technologies and engineers across the entire company.

The business is growing rapidly. We are currently significantly expanding the product team to develop more products in parallel. Development will grow accordingly, the system will become more complex, dependencies will increase, and the load on infrastructure will rise. We need someone to help manage this growth.

Team and approach to work

Currently, we have three team leads, about 12 developers, two ML engineers, and QA. In our work, we use Go, Ruby, Python, React, ClickHouse, Kafka, and other technologies.

We want to build our work around product teams, where the technical lead and product manager are jointly responsible for the results of their area. Engineers participate in finding solutions from the very beginning, understand the business context, and influence what and how the team does.

The team is small and dynamic. It is important to dive into technical details yourself: understand how the system works, why specific decisions were made, and what business goals they serve. We expect you to be able to independently research technology, test hypotheses, understand code or infrastructure, and, if necessary, get involved in implementing solutions.

You will work in close partnership with the CEO and the product team.

You will independently make decisions about the structure of engineering teams, hiring, and departures. Initially, we will discuss them with the CEO so that you have time to understand the people, the history of decisions, and the business context.

What needs to be done

• Prepare the engineering organization for growth: develop team leads, form teams with clear areas of responsibility, and plan hiring for product directions
• Define technology priorities together with leads: assess system limitations, develop architecture and infrastructure, manage technical risks and debt
• Improve the interaction between development and product: help teams agree on priorities, involve engineers in finding solutions, and eliminate dependencies that slow down work
• Increase development speed, predictability, and quality: develop approaches to releases, incidents, and reliability, find systemic causes of problems
• Verify the effect of changes: select useful engineering metrics, implement AI tools, and evaluate their impact on team performance

In the future, it may be necessary to separate the infrastructure of Travelpayouts and Aviasales. Timelines are not yet defined; it is important to understand current dependencies and evaluate gradual transition options in advance.

Where to start

In the first few months, we expect you to immerse yourself in the business, teams, and technologies, identify the main growth limitations, and agree with the CEO on a work plan: priorities, sequence of changes, resources, and success criteria.

We will evaluate changes based on agreed criteria and regular team feedback. To do this, we will document the initial state: how clear the priorities and responsibilities are, what hinders interaction and predictable development.

What experience is important to us

• Managing several engineering teams through leaders and developing leads
• Growing an engineering organization: hiring, forming teams, and changing structure to suit business tasks
• Organizational and technical changes that have taken root and yielded clear results
• Product development and the ability to link engineering solutions to business goals
• Technical depth and up-to-date practical skills that allow you to independently understand the system and work on solutions
• The ability to combine personal involvement with the development of independence for leads and teams

How we work

• Influence on company development: the opportunity to shape the engineering organization for the next stage of international business growth
• Work from anywhere in the world and payment in dollars
• Open communication: direct discussion of ideas and quick decision-making
• Compensation: Voluntary Medical Insurance (DMS), psychotherapy or foreign languages, sports activities, and sick leave
• Opportunity to work in Phuket with an ocean view