Manager — Cloud Platform (Traffic)

We are Despegar, part of the Prosus ecosystem, and for over 25 years we've been revolutionizing travel in Latin America ✈️. We build technologies that transform experiences and connect millions of people with their travel dreams. We are looking for talents who think 10x, act autonomously, and achieve real results. If you are passionate about innovation, learn quickly, and want to create on a team, this is the place for you.

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Traffic team within Cloud Platform. The team is responsible for the entire stack of traffic infrastructure components: ingress, load balancing, service mesh, API gateways, and everything that ensures efficient, secure, and scalable traffic flow for our applications on AWS and Kubernetes. This infrastructure is currently critical as it powers all of Despegar's traffic – approximately 2k microservices with 10M RPM, having a huge impact on the entire company. In turn, it's part of the foundation of Nebula, our internal platform that abstracts infrastructure complexity, allowing development teams to focus on product creation. The team is also responsible for the Secretos y Certificados stack: Vault, KMS. The role combines engineering leadership with strong technical involvement, as there is no dedicated Product Manager: the manager is responsible for prioritizing the roadmap, interacting with the teams consuming the platform, and balancing technical efforts with business impact.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the Traffic team: 1:1 meetings, frequent and honest feedback, professional development plans, performance reviews, and growth for each team member.
• Ensure quality and predictable delivery of results by the team, as well as healthy production operation of the traffic infrastructure.
• Propose and assist in defining work methodologies to improve team efficiency and resolve issues or friction in daily work (e.g., incident management, effective meeting facilitation, organizing tracking and progress, reviews, etc.).
• Actively participate in architectural decisions, propose solutions, and constructively challenge team proposals.
• Define and prioritize the roadmap with a product mindset: understand the needs of Nebula's client teams, balance technical debt with new features, and decide what to build and what not to build.
• Maintain active communication with other Cloud Platform teams and with teams consuming the platform.
• Manage production incidents: be responsible for ensuring the team responds correctly and timely, providing transparency and status, and initiating postmortems and long-term improvements.
• Foster the research and adoption of new technologies that bring value to the platform (e.g., new service mesh versions, traffic management strategies, network observability).
• Monitor the technical health (technical debt, observability, security, and best engineering practices) of all resources under their responsibility, creating a work environment that provides time and encourages the team to address these issues.
• Strategic Vision: Together with Area Leaders, shape the long-term backlog.

What are we looking for?

• 2+ years of experience as an Engineering Manager, leading development teams.
• 5+ years of software development experience, preferably in backend.
• Deep knowledge of scalable and fault-tolerant architectures, distributed systems, and dependency management.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS (EC2, RDS, EKS).
• Knowledge in container orchestration using Kubernetes and Docker.
• Experience with networking and traffic management: load balancers, service mesh, ingress controllers, API gateways, HTTP/TCP/gRPC protocols.
• Excellent communication skills to clearly explain complex technical concepts and interact with diverse teams.
• Proactive approach to developing a long-term backlog and prioritization skills with an end-user-focused mindset.
• Ownership mindset: accountable, results-oriented, capable of working with a high degree of autonomy and alignment.
• Experience designing microservices and managing clusters at scale.

Nice to have:

• Previous experience leading infrastructure or platform engineering teams.
• Experience with network observability tools (tracing, metrics, traffic debugging).
• Experience with advanced deployment strategies (canary, blue-green, traffic splitting).

Hands-on: Beyond team leadership, we expect you to drive and implement strategic technical initiatives, actively participating in the design, implementation, and evolution of the platform.

What do we offer?

• Real autonomy to make decisions and impact from day one.
• Continuous learning culture: we fail fast, learn, and scale.
• Diverse, collaborative, and silo-free team.
• Growth opportunities within a global ecosystem (Prosus).
• We value accountability, innovation, and putting people at the center.

Travel transforms you, working at Despegar does too ✈️