Engineering Manager (AI & Integrations)

About estaie: estaie is the first global infrastructure for extended stays of 15 to 365 days, connecting hotels, holiday homes, channel managers, PMSs, payment providers and other travel systems through intelligent inventory, pricing, search and distribution infrastructure. They operate globally with hubs in Dubai and Riyadh. Their AI layer powers dynamic pricing, agentic lead generation, smart inventory orchestration and autonomous operations. The role: You will build and lead the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team responsible for connecting estaie to the hospitality ecosystem and making integrations work in production. You own team operations, delivery, and quality standards. You are a hands-on engineer, coding in TypeScript, Python, and SQL, reviewing PRs, debugging production issues, and leading by example. You partner with the CTO on architecture and technical strategy and collaborate with product, sales, and partnerships. Tasks: — Lead the FDE team: hire, onboard, grow a remote team, set expectations for ownership, quality, and pace — Manage delivery across multiple partner integrations: prioritise, unblock, keep commitments realistic — Coach engineers on integration design, debugging, clean code, and partner collaboration — Conduct 1:1s, provide feedback, build culture of accountability, async collaboration, and written decisions — Stay hands-on: write production code in TypeScript, Python, SQL; own integrations end to end — Review PRs, set standards for testing, observability, documentation — Participate in partner debugging sessions, production incidents, lead post-mortems — Own the integration platform: design integration patterns (authentication including OAuth 2.0 token refresh, signed webhooks, retries, rate limiting, idempotency, error handling) — Own canonical data model normalising inventory, rates, availability from partners — Ensure no overselling: concurrency control, handling out-of-order/late events, reconciliation jobs — Build shared tooling: mock partner servers, contract tests, onboarding tools, dead-letter queues — Lead AI production use: LLMs and agents for data mapping, operational copilots, automation — Set AI guardrails: structured output with schema validation, human review, eval sets, least-privilege access — Control AI cost and latency with queues, rate limiters, caching, model routing — Own uptime, security, performance of integration layer across regions/environments — Act as senior technical contact for key partners, channel managers, PMSs, payment providers — Feed field learnings back into product and platform priorities Requirements: — 8 to 12 years software engineering experience, including 3+ years leading engineers in high-growth startup, SaaS or platform company — Strong hands-on skills in TypeScript (Node.js / NestJS, React / Next.js), SQL, PostgreSQL, and Python — Experience building and running third-party integrations in production: webhooks with signature checks, idempotency, retries, rate limits, data sync/reconciliation — Solid grounding in distributed systems: transactions, concurrency, queues, event-driven design, out-of-order events, fault tolerance — Production experience with LLMs: evaluation, constraints, cost control — Cloud deployment experience with Docker and CI/CD, ideally on GCP — Experience leading remote, distributed teams with async, written culture — Comfortable running technical calls with external engineering teams and turning them into plans — Bias for action, debugging, documenting, automating, measuring, focus on working products Nice to have: — Hospitality, travel, fintech, marketplace or other integration-heavy background — Hands-on experience with channel managers, PMSs, OTAs, reservation systems, payment gateways — Experience building or leading forward deployed, solutions or integrations engineering teams — Kafka / Redpanda, OpenSearch / Elasticsearch, pgvector, Terraform — Experience in GCC markets, Arabic language skills First 90 days plan: — First 30 days: learn platform and live integrations, ship first production change, meet key partners — By 60 days: own at least one integration end to end, agree shared integration standards with team — By 90 days: have FDE hiring plan running, delivery rhythm trusted by team and partners, clear reliability metrics Conditions: — Fully remote (MENA time zone alignment required) — After one year, relocation assistance to Dubai or Riyadh for the right candidate Tech stack: — Frontend: Next.js, React, TypeScript, TailwindCSS, Laravel, Vue.js — Backend: Node.js / NestJS, Python (FastAPI), REST APIs, webhooks — Data: PostgreSQL (with pgvector), MySQL, Redis, BigQuery, Datastream — Async and events: BullMQ, Pub/Sub, Kafka / Redpanda — AI: Vertex AI (Gemini, Claude), LangChain, embeddings, vector search, agentic workflows — Infrastructure: GCP (Cloud Run, Cloud Build, IAM, Secret Manager), Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions — Security and edge: Cloudflare (WAF, Zero Trust), OAuth 2.0, JWT — Observability: Cloud Logging, Prometheus, Grafana, alerting, anomaly detection — Integrations: channel managers, PMSs, OTAs, supplier APIs, payment gateways (Stripe, Tamara, Checkout.com), WhatsApp Business API, Twilio