Engineering Manager – Communications

London: Hybrid position, in office 2 days per week. 

With millions of diners, 60,000+ restaurant partners and 25+ years of experience, OpenTable, part of Booking Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: BKNG), is an industry leader with a passion for helping restaurants thrive. Our world-class technology empowers restaurants to focus on what matters most – their team, their guests, and their bottom line – while enabling diners to discover and book the perfect restaurant for every occasion. 

Every employee at OpenTable has a tangible impact on what we do and how we do it. You’ll also be part of a global team and its portfolio of metasearch brands. Hospitality is all about taking care of others, and it defines our culture.

Our team and mission

Our Comms Product team brings restaurant hospitality directly to diners by facilitating multi-channel communications and in-product messaging. We build communication tools for our restaurant partners to engage their guests and enhance the dining experience.

The team is responsible for our Direct Messaging product, an in-app chat feature connecting diners with restaurants, and our Premium Communications product, which gives restaurants control over how they communicate with their guests.

Your role

In this role, you will lead a team of six engineers to deliver impactful new communication tools and services for our restaurants and be responsible for team organisation, roadmap planning, and execution. All our managers are passionate about their team's career and personal development, and we want you to be, too.

You’ll work with the Senior Engineering Manager for Communications and help craft the vision of the Communications Platform and the communications domain. Day-to-day, you'll define and prioritise the engineering roadmap and advocate for good engineering practices and our culture of resiliency. You'll also collaborate with your Product Manager and Design team to craft the product roadmap.

Use your experience and creativity to facilitate the continuous improvement of team processes and collaboration. You will build good relationships with other engineering managers and technical leads to facilitate cross-team collaboration.

At OpenTable, you get the chance to use the latest technologies:

• The Communications microservices are mainly C# .NET 8 applications running in Docker and deployed to Kubernetes. 
• Our backend restaurant microservices are written in Java, and our front-ends are modern React and Redux applications written in TypeScript.
• MongoDB and PostgreSQL are used for data persistence, and GraphQL is used as our data aggregation layer.
• Many of our communications services are event-driven. Our event-driven architecture is built on Kafka.

We don't believe in checklists, but please apply if you:

• have a strong software engineering background, typically with 7+ years of hands-on experience, and have recently moved into a leadership role or are ready to do so.
• have proven experience in mentoring engineers and leading technical projects, and you are looking to grow as a people manager.
• have driven successful projects from discovery through to production.
• have worked with distributed systems and service-oriented and event-driven architectures at web scale.
• are a passionate technologist, keen to put product development and engineering management theory into practice and curious about different tools and approaches.

What does success look like?

In your first six months, you will partner with Product and Design to define and deliver the next Direct Messaging and Premium Communications features; meet the team’s technical excellence commitments; and lead your reports through a performance review cycle. 

Please consider applying if this role sounds exciting, even if you don’t meet all the requirements.

Benefits and Perks

• 5 weeks paid vacation + time off for your birthday (celebration day!)
• Pension plan contributions
• Private health & dental insurance
• Work from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year
• Focus on mental health and well-being:
• Company-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth
• Company-paid subscription to Headspace
• Annual company-wide week off a year - the whole team fully recharges (and returns without a pile-up of work!)
• Paid parental leave
• Paid volunteer time
• Focus on your career growth:
• Development Dollars
• Leadership development
• Access to thousands of on-demand e-learnings
• Travel Discounts
• Employee Resource Groups
• Income protection and life assurance
• Employee Assistance Program - including 24/7 GP & free legal advice
• Discounted gym membership
• Bike2Work
• Season ticket loan
• Social events & Thursday happy hours
• Free lunch 2 days per week

Work Environment & Flexibility

At OpenTable, we pride ourselves on fostering a global and dynamic work environment. As a team member with us, you will benefit from a schedule tailored to accommodate a global workforce operating across multiple time zones. While the majority of your responsibilities may align with conventional business hours, there will be instances where you are expected to manage communications - via calls, Slack messages, or emails - outside of regular working hours to effectively collaborate with international colleagues, respond to restaurant partners, and/or address urgent matters. OpenTable will always abide by and consider local laws and regulations.

 

Inclusion

We’re committed to creating a workplace where everyone feels they belong and can thrive. We know the best ideas come when we bring different voices to the table, so we're building a team as dynamic as the diners and restaurants we serve—and fostering a culture where everyone feels welcome to be themselves.

 

If you need accommodations during the application or interview process, or on the job, we’re here to support you. Please reach out to your recruiter to request any accommodations.

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