VP - Engineering - India Technology Operations - OTA

About the Organization

Headquartered in Canada with offices in Mumbai and Ahmedabad, and founded in 2005 by the current CEO, FlightNetwork has become - in nine short years - the second largest online travel agency in Canada; second only to Expedia. Its staff of over 300 employees works tirelessly to offer highly discounted prices for domestic and international airfares as well as hotels, vacation packages, and car rentals. Customers can book their travel online 24 hours a day, seven days a week, or by phoning its call centre where travel specialists help create customized itineraries.

FlightNetwork will transform travel through Technology, Marketing and Customer Experience. We will do this by:

- Growing our international flight offering

- Diversifying our portfolio to include hotels, cars and vacation packages

- Creating an innovative mobile experience in travel

- Creation of customer loyalty due to a superior Customer Experience

- Creating B2B2C white label partnerships

- Creation of a Culture of high performance, engagement and accountability

FlightNetwork created and developed its own proprietary flight booking engine. Most companies in the space purchase third party technology but we believe our booking engine technology is world class and provides a competitive edge to the business.

To fuel its growth, FlightNetwork stays at the forefront of online marketing using sophisticated mobile and digital technologies, and is recognized as a true innovator not just in Canada but around the world.

FlightNetwork has a passion for User Experience, both online and offline. We drive customer retention through our unique value propositions such as Price Drop Protection.

About the ROLE - This is a leadership role that will lead all of the India Technology Operations.

FlightNetwork is seeking to recruit a Vice President of Engineering for our India technology teams who will report directly to our Canadian based Chief Technology Officer. As noted above, FlightNetwork has experienced explosive growth since its inception but in many ways it is just scratching the surface of its future promise. To realize its full potential, the Company needs an exceptionally strong technology executive to fill the lead role in Ahmedabad.

This Vice President will lead a scalable, high-performance delivery team in India. This is a key role for Flight Network because the delivery teams in India impact each significant strategic initiative.

Based in FlightNetwork- s office in Ahmedabad, the Vice President will be in charge of transforming the engineering team to an AGILE, high quality delivery team. To do this the Vice President must create effective relationships across the organization in Product, IT Infrastructure, Call Centre and Marketing. The Vice President must create a confidence for all stakeholders that the engineering teams can deliver on time and with high quality

Given the demands of the position, the Vice President role will appeal to a confident, proactive, high-energy individual who thrives in a lean, agile, fast-paced, high-growth environment. This individual must understand that speed of delivery is essential to the success of FlightNetwork - while ensuring that speed does not sacrifice quality.

Major Responsibilities:

FlightNetwork's Vice President will be expected to:

- Lead the technology teams to create and then deliver on the Product Roadmap.

- Continue the effort to move the technology team to becoming AGILE (scrum / Kanban / XP)

- Commit to fostering a quality-focused development culture focused on TDD/BDD (test-driven and behavior-driven development)

- Create, implement and manage processes and ensure best practices for software development, version control, unit testing etc. as well as build, test, release mechanisms

- Lead the Talent management effort for India Technology, including hiring, developing and retaining a best in class team.

- Lead the training efforts for the India team - ensure that developers have regular performance management, development plans.

- Partner with the Director, Development to lead the effort to re- platform FlightNetwork- s world class booking engine and create world class customer experience through our mobile and UI technology.

- Improve the quality and depth of cross-business relationships and is involved in cross-business/decision-making.

- Ensure Technology is aligned to the overall company strategic imperatives.

- Plan Technology delivery, service levels

- Determine Technology- s contribution to the business and continuously seek to improve product and service quality.

Key Relationships

Reports to - Chief Technology Officer (Canada)

Direct reports:

- Sr. Manager, Project Management

- Lead Developer

- 5 Development teams (25 Developers)

Other Key Relationships:

- Chief Digital Officer

- Project Team Leaders

- Director Development (Canada)

- Director IT Infrastructure

- Product Management

Selection Criteria:

Required Technical Capabilities:

- Sound knowledge of development within an Agile framework

- Object oriented Perl, Moose, Catalyst framework, DBIx: Class, HTML

- Advanced UI/UX design concepts: HTML, CSS and JavaScript

- Experienced in Java, Hibernate, Spring, Spring MVC and Hibernate ORM

- Experience with RESTful API consumption and construction

- Familiarity with JSON/XML/SOAP and message buses

- Familiarity with scraping techniques and mechanisms

- Experience with Version Control Systems like Git (Gihub, Gitolite, Gitlab) SVN and CVS.

- Expertise in Linux

Required Experience:

- A minimum of 10 years of progressive experience in Technology-related (engineering, development and infrastructure) positions including at least five years in a senior Technology role in an online business environment; prior experience in the flight, hotels and/or vacation travel industry would be ideal.

- Bachelor degree is required. MBA is preferred.

- Experience in reporting to a North American Head office in a highly matrixed environment

- Experience in leading AGILE development teams

- Proven track record in driving technology-enabled business innovation and increasing innovation throughput.

- Proven experience in partnering with third-party vendors or outsourcing technology projects, ensuring collaboration and on time delivery of agreed upon projects.

- Experience building culture with high levels of performance, engagement, and accountability, with delivery of a portfolio of multiple concurrent projects across different technology platforms and programming;

- Strong knowledge of ecommerce, CRM and contact centre packaged solutions would be ideal.

- Experience in a senior IT role in a business environment that includes mobile application development and solutions.

IT IS MANDATORY TO SHARE CURRENT COMPENSATION DETAILS WHILE APPLYING FOR THIS POSITION