# Tech Lead, Ramp Travel
**Company:** [Ramp](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/ramp)
As Tech Lead for Ramp's Travel team, you'll lead a six-person engineering team building the embedded travel booking and management platform within Ramp's spend management infrastructure. This role combines hands-on technical leadership with strategic ownership of travel management surfaces, third-party integrations, agentic AI features, and team growth, requiring demonstrated experience managing engineers while maintaining technical depth in transactional systems with external dependencies.
**Role:** Lead
**Seniority:** Lead
**Locations:** New York, NY (HQ)
**Salary:** 275000–400000 USD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ramp/3c43dea1-3cd7-45ab-96f1-4054cfa875ff)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/ramp/tech-lead-ramp-travel
---
## Responsibilities

- Engineering Team Leadership and Development: Lead, mentor, and coach the Ramp Travel engineering team of approximately six engineers, with direct accountability for their professional growth, technical development, and career progression. Establish clear performance expectations, provide constructive feedback, and create opportunities for engineers to own impactful projects. Build a high-performing culture that balances individual contributor excellence with collaborative problem-solving, ensuring team members develop both technical depth and cross-functional communication skills.
- Product Delivery and System Ownership: Own complete delivery across all travel management surfaces including flight and hotel search, inventory management, dynamic quoting and repricing engines, checkout flows, policy evaluation systems, loyalty program integration, and post-booking servicing capabilities. Drive architectural decisions that balance feature velocity with system maintainability. Establish engineering standards that ensure code quality, testability, and operational excellence across these interconnected systems.
- Third-Party Integration and Reliability Management: Architect and maintain reliable integration points with external travel suppliers, Global Distribution System (GDS) content providers, aggregator platforms, Travel Management Company (TMC) systems, and On-Booking Tool (OBT) connections. Develop robust error handling, fallback strategies, and monitoring systems to ensure system correctness despite external dependencies. Lead incident response for integration failures and establish processes for maintaining data integrity in transactional flows involving multiple external parties.
- Cross-Functional Partnership and Enterprise Strategy: Collaborate with Product Management, Design, Operations, Partnerships, and Sales teams to understand and execute on enterprise travel commitments from strategic customers. Translate business requirements into technical roadmaps, communicate technical constraints and opportunities to non-technical stakeholders, and represent engineering perspectives in product strategy discussions. Support sales initiatives with technical architecture discussions and feasibility assessments for complex customer requirements.
- AI-Assisted Development and Agentic Features: Establish the team's practices and standards for AI-assisted development tooling and Large Language Model integration. Lead the implementation of agentic booking features that automate and enhance the traveler experience. Evaluate and adopt appropriate AI/LLM technologies, define responsible deployment patterns, and ensure agentic systems operate safely within policy constraints and business logic boundaries.
- Team Growth and Hiring: Lead recruitment and hiring efforts to scale the Travel engineering team beyond its current six-person size. Define hiring criteria that attract senior engineers capable of owning complex travel domain problems. Participate in technical interviews, assess architectural thinking, and evaluate candidates' experience with transactional systems. Build a diverse pipeline of candidates with relevant expertise in fintech, enterprise software, or travel domain experience.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Computer Science or Related Technical Degree","description":"Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or equivalent professional experience. While not strictly required at Ramp, a strong technical foundation in computer science fundamentals is valuable for understanding system design and architecture patterns."}

### technical

- {"name":"Transactional System Architecture","description":"Demonstrated expertise designing and maintaining transactional systems with complex external dependencies. Experience building systems where reliability and data correctness are non-negotiable, such as payment processing, marketplace transactions, logistics platforms, or booking systems. Understanding of distributed transaction patterns, consistency models, and failure recovery strategies."}
- {"name":"Integration Engineering","description":"Strong background integrating with multiple third-party APIs and establishing reliable communication patterns. Experience handling asynchronous operations, webhook management, rate limiting, retry logic, and graceful degradation when external services fail. Familiarity with real-time inventory management and content synchronization challenges."}
- {"name":"System Design and Architecture Review","description":"Ability to lead technical design reviews, evaluate architectural proposals, and make informed trade-offs between performance, scalability, maintainability, and time-to-market. Comfortable discussing distributed systems concepts, database design, caching strategies, and API design patterns at a depth sufficient to guide team decisions."}
- {"name":"Backend Development Proficiency","description":"Current technical competency in backend development languages and frameworks commonly used in fintech and platform companies. Hands-on ability to understand code quality, review pull requests substantively, and contribute code when needed. Recent experience with modern development practices including version control, testing frameworks, and deployment automation."}

### experience

- {"name":"Engineering Leadership Experience","description":"Minimum of two years directly managing software engineers, with team size ranging from approximately five to fifteen people. Demonstrated track record of successfully scaling small teams, improving team velocity, and developing junior engineers into mid-level contributors. Experience with performance management, conflict resolution, and building psychological safety within engineering teams."}
- {"name":"Zero-to-One Product Building","description":"Proven ability to lead the creation of new products or significant features from conception through launch. Experience making critical architectural decisions with incomplete information, iterating quickly on initial designs, and establishing foundational systems that scaled. Familiarity with trade-offs between building a minimum viable product and establishing sustainable architecture."}
- {"name":"Scaling and Growth Leadership","description":"Track record of taking products or systems beyond initial launch and scaling to handle increased complexity, user base, or transaction volume. Experience managing technical debt, refactoring legacy systems while maintaining velocity, and establishing scalability practices. Demonstrates strategic thinking about when to rewrite versus incremental improvement."}
- {"name":"High-Ownership Problem-Solving","description":"Demonstrated comfort taking ambiguous, high-stakes problems with incomplete information and driving them to successful resolution. Experience operating with high agency and urgency, pushing for clarity on requirements, and taking decisive action. Ability to escalate problems effectively when needed while maintaining responsibility for outcomes."}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Engineering Team Leadership","description":"Ability to lead, mentor, and develop software engineers; establish team practices; conduct technical interviews; and make hiring decisions. Track record of growing engineers' capabilities and careers."}
- {"name":"Architectural Thinking","description":"Capacity to design systems that balance scalability, reliability, and time-to-market. Experience evaluating technology trade-offs and making informed decisions about system design patterns, database architecture, and API design."}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Collaboration","description":"Strong ability to work effectively with Product, Design, Operations, and Sales teams. Translates between technical and business language, communicates technical constraints clearly, and advocates for engineering perspectives in product strategy."}
- {"name":"Hands-On Technical Contribution","description":"Willingness to code and solve problems directly, even in a leadership role. Maintains technical currency sufficient to lead design reviews, evaluate technical proposals, and contribute code when necessary."}
- {"name":"Ownership Mentality","description":"High level of personal accountability for outcomes, comfort with ambiguity, and willingness to take difficult decisions. Drives problems to resolution rather than escalating ownership."}
- {"name":"Product Judgment","description":"Ability to think critically about user experience, business value, and technical implementation in concert. Comfort discussing trade-offs with non-technical stakeholders and advocating for customer-centric solutions."}

### preferred

- {"name":"Corporate Travel Industry Experience","description":"Background in corporate travel domain including experience with corporate online booking tools (OBTs), Global Distribution System (GDS) and NDC content integration, traveler-facing applications, or Travel Management Company (TMC) integrations. Understanding of travel industry standards and workflows."}
- {"name":"Enterprise B2B FinTech","description":"Previous experience building or leading teams in enterprise financial technology or Travel & Expense (T&E) management platforms. Understanding of compliance requirements, audit trails, and enterprise customer needs."}
- {"name":"AI and LLM Integration","description":"Experience rolling out AI-assisted development tooling to engineering teams or shipping features powered by Large Language Models. Understanding of agentic AI patterns, prompt engineering, and responsible AI deployment practices."}
- {"name":"API and Integration Architecture","description":"Deep experience designing and managing complex integration strategies with multiple external APIs, establishing resilience patterns, and handling eventual consistency challenges in third-party dependent systems."}
- {"name":"Mobile and Web Development","description":"Strong background in full-stack development including web and mobile platforms. Experience optimizing user experience across browser and native applications. Understanding of cross-platform architecture and responsive design patterns."}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration platform essential for managing microservices in a travel platform, enabling reliable deployment and scaling of integrations with external suppliers."}
- {"name":"GitHub","description":"Version control and collaboration platform for managing code, enabling team workflows, code reviews, and maintaining history of changes across travel platform components."}
- {"name":"DataDog or Similar Observability","description":"Monitoring and observability platform critical for tracking system health, detecting integration failures with external APIs, and identifying performance bottlenecks in real-time."}
- {"name":"Jira or Linear","description":"Project management and issue tracking systems for organizing team priorities, managing roadmap, and maintaining visibility into sprint progress and blocking issues."}

### others

- {"name":"GDS/NDC Integration Platforms","description":"Understanding of Global Distribution System and New Distribution Channel standards used for accessing flight and hotel inventory from suppliers worldwide."}
- {"name":"API Management and Integration Middleware","description":"Experience with platforms and patterns for managing multiple external API connections, including authentication, rate limiting, response transformation, and error handling."}
- {"name":"Large Language Models (LLMs) and Agentic AI","description":"Emerging familiarity with AI assistants, prompt engineering, and agentic patterns that automate complex workflows like booking, policy application, and travel recommendations."}
- {"name":"Event-Driven Architectures","description":"Understanding of event streaming, message queues, and asynchronous processing patterns essential for coordinating across travel booking lifecycle and external service integrations."}

### databases

- {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Relational database ideal for transactional systems requiring ACID compliance, essential for maintaining data integrity in booking systems and financial records."}
- {"name":"Redis","description":"In-memory cache for high-performance access to frequently accessed data like flight availability, pricing caches, and session state in real-time booking systems."}
- {"name":"DynamoDB","description":"NoSQL database suitable for handling variable workloads and high-throughput scenarios in travel search and real-time inventory management systems."}

### languages

- {"name":"TypeScript","description":"Primary language for modern fintech platforms, providing type safety for complex business logic and reducing runtime errors in payment and transaction systems."}
- {"name":"Python","description":"Commonly used for backend services, data processing, and integration logic, particularly in financial and travel platforms for building robust APIs and middleware."}
- {"name":"JavaScript","description":"Essential for web-based travel booking interfaces and real-time user experiences in flight and hotel search, checkout, and trip management applications."}

### frameworks

- {"name":"React","description":"Modern frontend framework for building interactive travel booking interfaces, search filters, and real-time availability updates on web and mobile platforms."}
- {"name":"Node.js","description":"Server-side runtime enabling rapid backend development with JavaScript, commonly used for building travel APIs and middleware that integrates with GDS and supplier systems."}
- {"name":"GraphQL","description":"Query language and runtime for efficiently fetching complex nested data like travel itineraries, pricing information, and availability across multiple GDS sources."}

## Benefits

### benefits

## Compensation

- **max:** 280000
- **min:** 210000
- **currency:** USD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

## Full description
# **About Ramp**

Ramp is building the smart infrastructure for finance teams, embedded in the transaction flow of every dollar a business spends. We automate how over $200B in annualized spend flows in and out of 70,000+ companies: authorizing payments, flagging risk, categorizing spend, and closing books.

The problems are high-stakes, data-dense, and unforgiving.

We hire people with high agency and high urgency. We look for slope over intercept. We care less about where you trained and more about what you’ve built. At Ramp, everyone is a builder who owns problems end to end and makes consequential decisions that shape the outcome.

The median Ramp customer saves 5% and grows revenue 16% in their first year – far in excess of businesses operating without Ramp. We believe every ambitious company deserves the same.

If you want to build systems that directly shape how companies move and manage billions, Ramp is the place to do it.

# **About the Role**

The Ramp Travel team builds the travel booking and management platform built-in to Ramp. We build the capabilities that allows travelers to stay productive on the road: flight and hotel search, booking and checkout, our agentic travel assistant, and on-the-go mobile trip guidance. We also own the capabilities that ensure companies are spending their travel dollars effectively: travel policy evaluation, supplier and TMC integrations and benchmarking, and data insights.

Growing the sophistication and global reach of the Travel product is a top strategic priority at Ramp. The work this team does directly enables Ramp to to support some of the largest and most interesting customers in the world.

## **What You’ll Do**

* Lead, mentor, coach, and grow the Ramp Travel engineering team (\~6 engineers today).
* Own delivery across our travel management surfaces: search and inventory, quoting and repricing, checkout, policy evaluation, loyalty, post-booking servicing.
* Own reliability and correctness of a system dependent on third parties: supplier APIs, GDS and aggregator content, TMC and OBT integrations.
* Partner with Product, Design, Ops, Partnerships, and Sales on enterprise travel commitments.
* Set the team's practices for AI-assisted development and ship agentic booking features.
* Hire. The team is expected to grow.

## **What You'll Need**

* 2+ years managing engineers, team size roughly 5 to 15.
* High levels of ownership. Comfortability taking difficult ambiguous problems and driving successful execution.
* Has built something 0→1 and then scaled it.
* Willing to be hands-on. This is a six-person team, and everyone at Ramp is a builder.
* Current enough technically to lead a design review and evaluate an architecture proposal.
* Strong product judgment and comfort talking to customers.
* Has owned a transactional system with external dependencies: booking, payments, marketplace, or logistics.

## **Preferred**

* Corporate travel domain experience, such as: corporate online booking tools (OBTs), integrations with travel content sources (GDS/NDC), and front-end traveler experiences.
* Enterprise B2B fintech or T&E background.
* Has rolled out agentic dev tooling to a team, or shipped LLM-backed features.

## **Benefits available to all full-time Ramp employees (Global)**

* Flexible PTO
* Centralized home-office equipment ordering
* Health and wellness stipend
* Budget for intra-office travel
* Weekly coffee stipend

## **United States**

* 100% medical, dental & vision insurance coverage for you, with partial coverage for dependents
* One Medical annual membership
* 401(k), including employer match on contributions made while employed by Ramp
* Fertility HRA (up to $10,000 per year)
* Parental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay
* Pet insurance
* In-office perks: lunch, snacks, drinks, and more
* Relocation expense coverage to NYC or SF (if needed)

## **Canada**

* Group medical, dental, and vision coverage through Sun Life
* Life, AD&D, and disability coverage
* Fertility drug coverage (up to $4,000 lifetime)
* Group Retirement Plan with employer match (RRSP + DPSP)
* Parental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay, with additional time available at reduced pay
* Employee Assistance Program and virtual care through Lumino Health

## **United Kingdom**

* Private medical insurance through Freedom Elite
* Virtual GP and at-home care via eMed x Livi
* Workplace pension through Penfold, with salary sacrifice option
* Parental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay with additional time available at reduced pay

## **Referral Instructions**

If you are being referred for the role, please contact that person to apply on your behalf.

## **Other notices**

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

_Beware of recruiting scams: Ramp will only contact you through official @_[_Ramp.com_](http://Ramp.com) _email addresses and will never ask for payment or sensitive personal information during the hiring process._

[Ramp Applicant Privacy Notice](https://ramp.com/legal/applicant-privacy-notice)