Engineering Team Lead (Java, AI-native)
HRS As a Company
HRS is a global technology company transforming how businesses manage lodging and meetings through AI-driven, data-centric solutions. With more than 50 years of experience, HRS serves global enterprises, hotel partners, and business travelers through Lodging-as-a-Service, Meeting-as-a-Service, and Workforce-as-a-Service offerings.
Business Unit
The Search & Book unit at HRS plays a pivotal role in delivering innovative solutions through HRS Connect, the company's flagship product within the expansive global corporate travel management market. HRS Connect specifically targets the rapidly growing and significantly underserved segments of corporate lodging, meetings, groups, and long stays. The unit develops, enhances, and maintains complex technology solutions that seamlessly integrate hotel distribution systems, Property Management Systems (PMS), Online Travel Agencies (OTA), and Hotel Chain systems into the HRS Connect platform. Leveraging robust connectivity, innovative technology, and data-driven insights, the unit ensures seamless connectivity, optimized travel spend, enhanced traveler experiences, and high-performance booking solutions for global enterprise customers.
Position
We are looking for an Engineering Team Lead in HCM City, Vietnam.
This is a hands-on leadership role for a business-critical product area. The ETL will lead an engineering team, own engineering delivery for the core booking infrastructure and grow an AI-native team from day one.
This is not a pure people-management role. You will lead engineers, own delivery, stay close to architecture, and set the operating model for how the team uses AI in daily engineering work: Spec-Driven Development, AI-assisted code review, test generation, regression analysis, documentation, and production diagnosis.
Challenges
Own engineering delivery for the Booking Engine, Offer Engine, Reservation Engine and related rate-management services.
Lead the team-wide AI-native operating model: Spec-Driven Development, AI-assisted code review, agentic SDLC, and measurable cycle-time improvement.
Drive performance and reliability improvement across latency, throughput, uptime, observability, and operational response.
Own engineering health: code quality, test coverage, defect escape ratio, CI/CD discipline, observability, and incident response.
Lead modernization of backend systems, including legacy Java components, JBoss-based services, and tightly coupled Maven architecture.
Lead technical decisions across Java, AWS ECS, PostgreSQL, Redis/Valkey, distributed transaction processing, and rate-engine trade-offs.
Hire, onboard, coach, and performance-manage the new Vietnam engineers.
What You Bring
Experience
7+ years of hands-on software engineering experience in enterprise SaaS, fintech, e-commerce, or high-throughput transactional systems.
3+ years in a technical leadership role, owning both delivery and people outcomes.
Practical experience leading a team through product growth, technical modernization, or major backend platform ownership.
Strong experience with Java, AWS, and modern cloud-native backend engineering.
Technical Depth
Strong understanding of distributed systems, API design, data modeling, caching, latency, throughput, transaction integrity, and reliability trade-offs.
Practical experience building or operating transaction-heavy backend systems - payments, bookings, order management, pricing engines, or equivalent.
Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL, Redis/Valkey or equivalent in-memory stores, and wide-column stores such as Cassandra.
Experience running containerized backend services on AWS ECS, EKS, or equivalent platforms.
Strong engineering discipline around CI/CD, automated testing, observability, SLOs, and incident response.
Track record of modernizing legacy Java stacks (e.g. older JVM versions, legacy application servers, tightly coupled multi-module builds) without disrupting business-critical traffic.
AI-Native Engineering
Demonstrated, hands-on application of AI tools across the full SDLC as a development paradigm: specification, design, implementation, code review, testing, and operations.
Practical experience with Spec-Driven Development - writing specifications precise enough to drive AI-generated implementations and verifying the output against the spec.
Comfortable orchestrating agentic workflows in the dev loop and setting clear human-in-the-loop boundaries for tasks that affect production.
Track record of measuring and improving AI-driven engineering productivity (cycle time, output per engineer, defect escape ratio) and treating AI adoption as a measurable engineering outcome rather than a vibe.
Capable of modelling and coaching an AI-native engineering culture so that the team's standard way of working is AI-assisted, not the exception.
People Leadership
Proven ability to lead, coach, and grow engineers through structured 1:1s, career development frameworks, and performance management.
Experience hiring and building high-performing teams; strong interviewing and calibration skills.
Empathetic and direct communicator who creates psychological safety and high accountability in equal measure.
Reliability & Observability
Experience defining and operating against SLOs/SLAs on transactional systems; familiar with distributed tracing, structured logging, alerting, and incident management practices.
Track record of building on-call culture and improving system reliability over time.
Proven track record of applying engineering best practices - fault tolerance, redundancy, graceful degradation, runbook discipline, and incident learning - to achieve and sustain 99.99% system availability in production environments.
Practical understanding of operational requirements for booking, reservation, and rate platforms where correctness, response time, and recovery behavior directly affect customer outcomes.
Leadership & Communication
Effective at aligning technical strategy with business goals and communicating across a wide range of stakeholders.
Comfortable operating in a matrix organization and driving cross-functional initiatives.
Strong written and verbal communication skills in English.
Adaptability
Thrives in a fast-paced, evolving environment. Embraces change and brings structure without rigidity.
Able to balance long-term architectural vision with near-term delivery commitments.
Personal Attributes
High ownership and self-direction; product development mindset, not ticket execution.
Empathy, authenticity, integrity, commitment, resilience, and respect in dealing with all stakeholders