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.

Booking.com offers customer service for an expanding product range through a multitude of channels including live chat, messaging, and voice. Our Customer Service teams support every customer, with any query, the first time around. This requires an exceptional ecosystem of tools, services, and technologies.

Challenges and opportunities for this role range from driving delivery and innovation across this ecosystem to implementing best-in-class third-party software and in-house built services, ensuring strong service levels across the technology stack. This will be achieved with a mix of in-house and external development teams.

Building and maintaining an outstanding partnership with business and product stakeholders from the Customer Service leadership team is essential to ensure successful delivery of all products and services.

This role is central in leading the Technology strategy for the Customer Service platform and covers:

• Overall CS Technology platform within Booking.com, including Enterprise Architecture
• Integrations between the 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
• AI for agent support within the Unified Agent Desktop (co-pilot, summarisation, AQM)
• AI for customer support including voice and chat bots

Required Qualifications

• Strong understanding of technology and a proven track record of designing and building high-quality services, web and mobile applications, especially high-volume consumer-facing applications
• Experience with third-party vendor relationships and integrations is a must-have
• Ideal candidates will have experience building or integrating technology systems for customer service organisations
• Experience with Amazon Connect, Pega, Parloa, or similar systems is a must-have
• 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

People & Function Leadership

• Lead, inspire, and motivate your Engineering function by leading by example, defining what success looks like, giving ownership, and 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 the business unit to lead and shape the people agenda
• Create a learning environment by coaching, maintaining two-way feedback, helping people extract and 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

Technology, Craft & Delivery Leadership

• 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 by proactively keeping 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

Technology, Architecture & Product Strategy

• Shape, define, and build new services, processes, and operational plans in alignment with the commercial and financial needs of the business
• Lead, take ownership of, and shape the technology strategic objectives and roadmaps
• Be a strategic thought partner and influence stakeholders across 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 decision-making by recognising and challenging assumptions, introducing relevant data, and multiple perspectives
• Ensure that 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

Overall Requirements

• Industry experience at fast-moving, innovative global technology companies
• Experience operating large, internet-scale applications and distributed systems spanning multiple languages, platforms, front-end 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 the environment and all systems
• Proven ability to contribute to system design, architecture, and problem-solving conversations, with the ability to get deep into technical details when needed
• Able to provide technical direction to teams, including driving tech strategy, making build-vs-buy decisions, and prioritising
• Strong collaboration on technology topics; the successful candidate should be able to work closely with counterparts in other organisations, including Senior Architects and Fellows
• Demonstrable experience of working in Agile environments and an Agile culture and ethos
• Demonstrable experience of setting, leading, and influencing both Engineering and Business strategy in the medium and long term
• Experience 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