Director of Technology - Customer Service

As the Director of Technology for Customer Service (CS), you will own the technology vision and lead all product build and integration teams responsible for powering the Customer Service department at Booking.com.

Your technology decisions will enable our 10,000+ agents to deliver on our 24/7 promise to support every customer, resulting in millions of successful trips and happy travelers.

As a global, industry-leading company which offers customer service for an expanding product range through a multitude of channels from live chat and messaging to voice, our Customer Service teams have a promise to support every customer, with any query, the first time around. This requires an exceptional ecosystem of tools, services and technologies in support of that.

Challenges and opportunities for the Director of Technology role range from driving delivery and innovation on this wide ecosystem, to implementing best in class third party software and in-house built services ensuring we maintain impressive service levels on our technology stack. Achieving this with a mix of in-house and external development teams.

• Overall CS Technology platform within Booking.com including the Enterprise Architecture
• Integrations between our CS platform and third parties
• API Ecosystem connecting the platform
• Bespoke Booking.com CS Agent tools, services and capabilities
• Technical relationship with third parties
• Management of in-house and third party development staff.
• CS provides technology and services for all of Booking.com across many BU's and verticals including Accommodations & Trips.
• AI for Agent support within the Unified Agent Desktop (co-pilot, summarisation, AQM)
• AI for Customer support including voice and chat bots.

• Strong understanding of technology and have a proven track record of designing and building high quality services, web and mobile applications, especially high volume consumer facing applications
• Experience with 3rd party vendor relationships and integrations are must-haves.
• Ideal candidates will have experience with building or integrating technology systems for Customer Service organisations.
• Experience with Amazon Connect, Pega, Parloa and or other similar systems are must-haves.
• At least 10 years of multi-level leadership experience is critical for this role
• Senior-level stakeholder management experience, including VP and SVP level experience

• Lead, inspire and motivate your Engineering function through leading by example and defining what success looks like, giving ownership & providing clarity when necessary
• Line manage Senior Managers as well as top technical talent, such as Principals.
• Communicate strategy in a compelling manner to multiple teams and stakeholders
• Foster inclusion by holding self and others accountable
• Drive people centric initiatives that enable workforce diversity
• Partner in and outside of our Business unit to lead and shape the people agenda
• Create a learning environment by coaching, maintaining two-way feedback, helping people extract & share personal learnings, and supporting teams to constantly adapt
• Foster the engineering culture; innovate, work as a team and celebrate success
• Build a world class team through nurturing, attracting, and retaining tech talent from around the world
• Empower your teams to do their best work at Booking.com
• Be curious, learn, iterate and shape our culture

• Lead, influence and own delivery within your function including department goals
• Partner with other functions and business units to deliver on our strategic agenda
• Maintain focus on the end goal, minimise risk and remove roadblocks for our strategic agenda
• Ensure clear and effective communication at all levels: proactively keep all stakeholders informed of what's happening, upcoming changes, projects, issues and risks
• Foster mastery in engineering craftsmanship across Booking.com including shaping ways of working
• Own Technology-wide topics and help lead and grow the department
• Embed Agile ways of working and values within the organisation
• Identify problems and significantly improve, change or adapt existing methods and techniques drawing from personal experiences and feedback
• Drive a DevOps culture

• Shape, define and build new services, processes and operational plans in alignment with the commercial and financial needs of the business
• Lead, take ownership and shape the technology strategic objectives and roadmaps
• Be a strategic thought partner and influence stakeholders across the Accommodations and the broader business to set and align the strategic direction of your function
• Make decisions in complex and ambiguous situations, and guide others in their decision making by recognizing and challenging assumptions, introducing relevant data and multiple perspectives
• Ensure that the Booking architecture principles and engineering practices are adhered to, and that there is direction and alignment for each product.
• Anticipate the need for changes based on context, and set renewed courses of action to engage teams and achieve goals, while striving to make the impact clear and understandable
• Drive innovation in your function
• Own the architecture across your function

• Industry experience at fast moving, innovative global technology companies
• Experience operating large, Internet scale applications and distributed systems spanning multiple languages, platforms, front and back end services, networks and public cloud platforms.
• Deep understanding of technology, with a proven track record of designing and building platforms at scale
• Highly familiar with the topology of their environment and all of their systems
• Proven ability to contribute to system design, architecture, and problem solving conversations. Ability to get deep into technical details when needed.
• Able to provide technical direction to the teams (driving tech strategy, making build v buy decisions, prioritising etc.)
• Great collaboration on technology topics; the successful candidate should be able to spar with their counterparts in other organisations, including Senior Architects and Fellows.
• Demonstrable experience of working in Agile environments and more importantly an Agile culture and ethos
• Demonstrable experience of setting, leading and influencing both the Engineering and Business strategy to the medium and long-term
• Experience with managing and coaching teams of senior tech leaders including building and growing teams
• Independent, pragmatic and proactive work attitude
• Well versed in Engineering Craftsmanship
• Building a DevOps culture
• Be humble and human
• Excellent communication skills
• Strong commercial acumen