Engineering Team Lead

Title- Engineering Team Lead (AI-First)

Location- Mohali

Why is this role mission critical

At HRS, the mission is to become the most trusted global platform for managing corporate Lodging and Meetings & Groups programs. As the company digitally reimagines corporate travel through Connect, a unified interface for enterprise clients, travel agents, and hotel suppliers, engineering leadership becomes central to turning platform ambition into reliable execution.

To support that mission, this role is defined as an AI-first Engineering Team Lead focused on building and evolving intelligent, scalable, and resilient product capabilities for hotel tech and corporate travel. AI-first engineering leadership generally combines team leadership, technical credibility, cross-functional execution, and the ability to embed AI-powered workflows and agentic patterns into software delivery and product design.

This is a hybrid leadership role that sits between technical leadership and engineering management. AI-first engineering manager and lead roles commonly emphasize credible technical direction, close product partnership, ownership of delivery outcomes, and the expectation that leaders can step into architecture, debugging, or implementation when needed, even if they are not coding every day.

The role unlocks robust, automated, and intelligent workflows across the supplier and traveler ecosystem, with a strong focus on hotel technology and corporate travel use cases. Domain familiarity in hotel tech and travel platforms is especially valuable because it helps leaders make better decisions around integrations, user journeys, and operational reliability in complex distribution environments.

What makes this role exciting

As Engineering Team Lead for an AI-first organization, this role leads a cross-functional team spanning engineers, QA, SRE, and interns, while partnering closely with the counterpart Product Manager to deliver business outcomes. AI-first team lead roles are increasingly structured around dual leadership with Product, where engineering owns the how, technical quality, architecture, and delivery, while Product owns prioritization and user value.

This role is responsible for shaping how AI and agentic thinking are applied first across the product and engineering lifecycle. Recent AI-first lead and manager roles consistently emphasize directing AI tools architecturally, designing agent workflows, defining evaluation and guardrail approaches, and using AI to accelerate delivery without compromising reliability, safety, or enterprise quality.

The role will:

• Lead and guide a cross-functional squad of software engineers, QA, SRE, and interns toward clear delivery, quality, and reliability outcomes.

• Partner closely with the Product Manager as a co-owner of execution, trade-offs, roadmap shaping, and stakeholder communication.

• Provide technically credible leadership across architecture, integration design, operational readiness, and engineering standards.

• Maintain enough hands-on depth to step into design reviews, incident resolution, debugging, proof-of-concepts, or critical implementation work when required.

• Drive AI-first and agentic-first thinking across the Product Software Development Life Cycle, including AI-assisted & Human-assisted AI development, workflow automation, evaluation, and guardrails.

• Build and improve systems that support hotel suppliers, corporate travelers, travel managers, and related business stakeholders through scalable platform capabilities.

• Work across Product, Architecture, SRE, Operations, Supplier-facing teams, and business stakeholders to deliver cohesive end-to-end solutions.

• Strengthen platform readiness through observability, incident response discipline, performance optimization, and reliable release practices.

Beyond direct team leadership, this role contributes to broader engineering maturity by championing AI-enabled ways of working, mentoring teams on how to use AI safely and effectively, and helping the organization evolve toward more intelligent automation. AI-first leadership roles increasingly expect leaders to define standards for AI velocity, multi-agent workflows, evaluation, and engineering quality at scale.

This is an opportunity to shape platform engineering in a high-value TravelTech environment where strong domain intuition, product partnership, and AI-first execution can materially improve supplier experience, operational efficiency, and customer outcomes.

What you bring

• Proven experience leading software delivery teams in a hybrid technical leadership and people leadership capacity. [3+ years in technical leadership, team leadership, or player-coach roles]

• Strong software engineering background with the technical depth to guide architecture, review designs, challenge trade-offs, and step in hands-on when necessary. [8+ years of software engineering experience]

• Demonstrated success managing cross-functional collaboration across engineers, QA, SRE, interns, Product Managers, architects, and business stakeholders.

• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to build trusted partnerships and communicate clearly with technical and non-technical audiences.

• Experience working in a close counterpart model with Product Managers to align roadmap, priorities, delivery plans, and customer value.

• Deep interest in AI-first software development, with familiarity in AI-assisted engineering, LLM-based workflows, agentic systems, RAG, orchestration patterns, evaluation approaches, and guardrails.

• Ability to guide teams in applying AI and automation pragmatically across development, testing, operations, incident response, and product capabilities.

• Strong understanding of modern engineering practices including cloud-native architecture, APIs, distributed systems, CI/CD, observability, reliability, and secure software delivery.

• Experience in hotel tech, hospitality platforms, TravelTech, or corporate travel is a strong plus, especially where product and engineering decisions depend on domain knowledge, partner integrations, and operational sensitivity.

• Familiarity with enterprise workflows involving suppliers, travel programs, booking ecosystems, or complex third-party integrations is an added advantage.

• Self-starter with a growth mindset, strong judgment, and bias toward outcomes, simplification, and continuous improvement.

• Excellent English communication skills, including the ability to influence stakeholders, align teams, and translate technical direction into business impact.

Why join us

This role sits at the center of shaping an AI-first engineering culture in a domain where operational quality, automation, and partner experience matter deeply. Current AI-first engineering leadership roles place strong emphasis on using AI not just as an add-on, but as a primary lens for how teams build, operate, and scale software systems.

The opportunity is especially compelling because it combines technical leadership, stakeholder influence, product partnership, and domain relevance in hotel tech and corporate travel. It offers the chance to guide teams that build intelligent, adaptive, and reliable platforms for a complex global ecosystem, while helping define what agentic-first engineering looks like in practice.

Ready to make a difference? Apply now!