Job Description

Serko is a cutting-edge tech platform in global business travel & expense technology. When you join Serko, you become part of a team of passionate travellers and technologists bringing people together, using the world’s leading business travel marketplace. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer, we embrace the richness of diversity, showing up authentically to create a positive impact. There's an exciting road ahead of us, where travel needs real, impactful change.

With offices in New Zealand, Australia, North America, Bengaluru and China, we value hiring people from different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives to help us build a world-class team and product.

Requirements

Make an Impact

The Director of Engineering is responsible for all activities within one of Serko’s Engineering streams. They are accountable for the performance, delivery, and overall effectiveness of all activities within their stream.

They provide leadership and day-to-day management of the streams’ leadership team, fostering a high-performance culture to deliver on our technology strategy, realise customer value, and achieve company goals.

What you will be doing

• Overall responsibility for all Engineering activity within a stream, including delivery, system health, cost effectiveness, reliability, recruitment, performance management, etc.
• Line manager for Senior Principal Engineer(s), Senior Engineering Manager(s), and any other specialist roles that may be required for each stream
• Responsible for ensuring the Product & Technology Operating Tenets are applied consistently across the business unit;
• Expected to drive Serko forward as a contributing member of the Product & Technology Leadership Team

What you'll bring

• Proven ability to drive the technical vision for an entire business unit, aligning it with company-wide strategy and identifying emerging technologies to evolve organisational capabilities.
• Expert at delivering data-driven insights to the C-Suite (CTO, VP). Ability to simplify technical complexity into executive-ready narratives and negotiate cross-functional trade-offs.
• Accountable for building high-performing teams through structured succession planning, strategic recruitment, and ensuring consistency in performance standards across multiple units.
• Proven track record in translating business goals into engineering roadmaps, balancing technical debt with innovation, and overseeing mission-critical architectural decisions.
• Leads the delivery strategy for the business unit portfolio, managing high-level risks and enforcing excellence standards to ensure predictability and scalability.
• Ability to translate segment strategy into functional execution plans, contributing to the development of corporate-wide evaluation criteria for projects and people.
• Skilled in creating qualitative and quantitative measures to drive BU-wide performance, embedding data-driven decision-making into leadership practices at all levels.
• Shapes the AI roadmap for the business unit; partners with Product and Data leaders to embed AI into platforms while building organisational readiness for AI adoption.
• Champions technology and process improvements at the organisational level, empowering managers to test and scale new approaches to eliminate systemic inefficiencies.
• Models adaptability and resilience during organisational change, using high emotional intelligence to resolve cross-unit conflicts and inspire trust across the business.
• Proven experience managing budgets for headcount, tooling, and infrastructure, ensuring optimal resource allocation and cost-benefit alignment.

Benefits

Serko employees are rewarded for their efforts with good salaries, competitive benefits, flexible working arrangements and a great social atmosphere. Our environment is upbeat, energetic and fun, and we look for people to add to our culture, not just fit our culture. We value people who have personal integrity, are adaptable, and are courageous with what they do. The pace is energetic. Serko employees work collaboratively with energy and enthusiasm - so you will want to be up for the ride. If you are up for a challenge at its most crucial time in history and are excited about joining our Xi'an team, we'd love to hear from you.