Engineering Manager - AI / Integration

estaie is the AI-native extended-stay platform for 15 to 365-night stays. We connect hotels, holiday homes, channel managers, PMSs, payment providers and other travel systems through intelligent inventory, pricing, search and distribution infrastructure. We operate globally, with hubs in Dubai and Riyadh. Our AI layer powers dynamic pricing, agentic lead generation, smart inventory orchestration and autonomous operations for operators, corporate bookers and digital nomads alike.
Location: Remote-first (MENA time zone alignment required: at least 8 hours per day overlapping with Gulf Standard Time, UTC+4)
Reports to: Nimit Solanki, CTO & Co-founder
Leads: Forward Deployed Engineers (Integrations)
Type: Full-time
Shape of the role: roughly 50% people and delivery leadership, 50% hands-on engineering
THE ROLE
You will build and lead our Forward Deployed Engineering team: the engineers who connect estaie to the hospitality ecosystem and make those integrations work in production. You own how the team works, what it ships, and the quality bar it holds.
You are also one of the team's strongest engineers. You take real integration and AI work yourself, review PRs, debug production issues alongside your team, and lead by example rather than from a dashboard. You partner directly with the CTO on architecture and technical strategy, and with product, sales and partnerships on what gets built and when.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
Lead the FDE team
Hire, onboard and grow a remote team of Forward Deployed Engineers, and set clear expectations on ownership, quality and pace.
Run delivery across many partner integrations at once: prioritise, unblock, and keep commitments to partners realistic.
Coach engineers on integration design, debugging across systems, clean code and working directly with partners.
Run 1:1s, give direct feedback, and build a culture of accountability, async collaboration and written decisions.
Stay hands-on
Write production code in TypeScript, Python and SQL, and own some integrations end to end yourself.
Review PRs and set the engineering standard for testing, observability and documentation.
Join the hardest partner debugging sessions and production incidents, and lead the post-mortems.
Own the integration platform
Design the patterns every integration follows: authentication (including OAuth 2.0 token refresh), signed webhooks, retries with backoff, rate limiting, idempotency and error handling.
Own the canonical data model that normalises inventory, rates and availability from partners with different schemas.
Make sure we never oversell: concurrency control on inventory, handling of out-of-order and late events, and reconciliation jobs that catch drift with external systems.
Build the shared tooling that makes each new integration faster than the last: mock partner servers, contract tests, onboarding tools, dead-letter queues with replay.
Bring AI into production safely
Lead the use of LLMs and agents across integration workflows, such as mapping messy partner data, operational copilots and automation.
Set the guardrails: structured output with schema validation, human review for low-confidence results, eval sets as CI gates, and least-privilege tool access for agents.
Keep AI cost and latency under control with queues, rate limiters, caching and model routing.
Reliability and partners
Own uptime, security and performance of the integration layer across regions and environments.
Act as the senior technical contact for key partners, channel managers, PMSs and payment providers.
Feed what you learn in the field back into product and platform priorities.
TECH STACK
Frontend: Next.js, React, TypeScript, TailwindCSS; Laravel and Vue.js on parts of the core platform
Backend: Node.js / NestJS, Python (FastAPI) for AI and data services, REST APIs and webhooks
Data: PostgreSQL (with pgvector), MySQL, Redis, BigQuery, Datastream
Async and events: BullMQ, Pub/Sub, Kafka / Redpanda
AI: Vertex AI (Gemini, Claude), LangChain, embeddings and 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 and anomaly detection
Integrations: Channel managers, PMSs, OTAs and supplier APIs; payment gateways such as Stripe, Tamara and Checkout.com; WhatsApp Business API and Twilio
WHAT YOU BRING
8 to 12 years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years leading engineers in a high-growth startup, SaaS or platform company.
You still code. Strong, current hands-on skills in TypeScript (Node.js / NestJS, React / Next.js), SQL and PostgreSQL, plus working Python.
A track record of building and running third-party integrations in production: webhooks with signature checks, idempotency, retries, rate limits, and data sync or reconciliation.
Solid grounding in distributed systems: transactions and concurrency, queues and event-driven design, out-of-order events, and fault tolerance.
Production experience with LLMs, including how to evaluate them, constrain them and keep their costs in check.
Cloud deployment experience with Docker and CI/CD, ideally on GCP.
Experience leading a remote, distributed team with an async, written culture.
Professional-level English: you can run a technical call with an external engineering team and turn it into a plan, and write clear documentation, PR reviews and post-mortems.
Bias for action. You debug, document, automate and measure, and you care about products that work, not just systems that run.
NICE TO HAVE
Hospitality, hotels, holiday homes, travel-tech, fintech, marketplace or other integration-heavy background is an absolute plus and will be weighted heavily.
Hands-on experience with channel managers, PMSs, OTAs, reservation systems or payment gateways.
Experience building or leading a forward deployed, solutions or integrations engineering team.
Kafka / Redpanda, OpenSearch / Elasticsearch, pgvector, Terraform.
Experience in the GCC markets, and Arabic language skills.
YOUR FIRST 90 DAYS
First 30 days: learn the platform and our live integrations, ship your first production change, and meet our key partners.
By 60 days: own at least one integration end to end, and agree the shared integration standards (auth, webhooks, idempotency, testing) with the team.
By 90 days: have the FDE hiring plan running, a delivery rhythm the team and partners trust, and clear reliability metrics for the integration layer.
WHY JOIN ESTAIE
Build and shape a new team from the start, at the frontier of AI-native hospitality.
Work directly with a founding team from Careem, Grab and Deutsche Telekom who value clarity, velocity and ownership.
Real-world complexity: partners and systems across the global hospitality ecosystem, with your work reaching production fast.
Flat, product-driven culture with strong engineering autonomy and end-to-end ownership.
Competitive compensation and founding-team ESOP potential.
Remote-first, or hybrid from our hubs in Dubai and Riyadh.
COMPENSATION NOTE
The total compensation for this role is capped at a maximum of USD 2,000 per month (gross, all-inclusive). This ceiling is firm, so please apply only if it is acceptable to you. Payment is made in USD or another international currency.