Head of Engineering

Welcome to MICE DESK



MICE DESK is the leading European company automating the sales process in the hospitality industry — and we are now expanding to the US.

Our platform, Rocket, turns event, meeting, and group inquiries into autonomous end-to- end workflows: from RFP to signed contract, across email, CRM, and PMS systems. We integrate with the systems hotels actually run on — Oracle OPERA Cloud, SIHOT, Guestline, Salesforce, Marriott's enterprise stack — which means our engineers work inside real hotel operations, not against sandbox APIs.

We are a Series A-stage company with a deliberately small team and real enterprise traction: major hotel groups across Europe run their group sales on Rocket. The people joining now shape the product, the deployment playbook, and the culture.



The Role

You own engineering at MICE DESK. Fully. There is no CTO layer above you — our technical co-founder is moving into the CPO role, and engineering direction, architecture, delivery, and team are yours. You report directly to the founders.

This is a hands-on leadership role: you will lead the engineering team including our AI/Data function, own the interface to Product, and be accountable for everything that ships.



What You Will Own

1. Engineering, end-to-end. Architecture, system design, delivery against the roadmap, reliability, and technical debt. Backend, frontend, DevOps, QA, and the AI/Data team all roll up to you. You set lightweight processes that make a small team ship fast without breaking things.

2.An AI-enabled engineering pipeline. We don't just build AI products — we build with AI. You will push the engineering organization itself to be AI-native: agentic coding workflows, AI-assisted review and testing, automation of everything repetitive. A team of [10] should ship like a team of 30, and making that true is your job.

3. AI as a core system capability. Architect the integration of LLMs and agentic workflows into production systems: combining deterministic logic with AI-generated outputs, with real validation, fallback, and reliability strategies. Hospitality operations run on our platform — non-determinism is not an excuse for unreliability.

4. The team. Hire, mentor, and scale. You inherit a strong small team and grow it into a high-performance engineering organization with a culture of ownership and speed. You will also own our distributed hiring strategy [Germany + Armenia — confirm].

5.Product and business alignment. Work directly with the founders and Product. Challenge requirements, simplify complexity, and connect engineering work to outcomes: revenue, automation, customer impact. As we enter the US market, engineering has to keep pace with enterprise-scale customers on two continents.



What Success Looks Like

• 6 months: Delivery is predictable, the AI-enabled dev pipeline is running, and the team has grown with A-players you hired.
• 12 months: The platform scales with US enterprise customers, core systems are reliable and observable, and engineering is a competitive advantage — not a bottleneck.
  

Who You Are



Must-have

• 10+ years of software engineering, 5+ in engineering leadership at high-growth product companies
• Strong hands-on backend or full-stack background — you can still go deep
• Proven experience scaling engineering teams at Series A–C startups
• Strong architecture expertise: APIs, distributed systems, event-driven design, cloud
• LLM / agentic AI systems in production — and conviction about AI-assisted engineering itself
• Product mindset; you connect technical decisions to business outcomes

• Comfortable with ambiguity, speed, and full accountability

Nice-to-have

• Hospitality tech, CRM, PMS, or revenue management background
• Enterprise integration experience (Salesforce, Oracle OPERA Cloud, Microsoft Graph API)
• Experience leading distributed/international teams

Hiring Process

1. Intro interview — background, leadership experience, motivation
2. Technical & leadership deep dive — architecture, system design, team scaling, AI-native development
3. Founder interview — product vision, ownership, long-term impact

Why MICE DESK

• Full ownership ofengineering at the European market leader, now going to the US
• Real enterprise integrations and real-world workflows — not a demo product
• A Series A company where your decisions shape the product, the architecture, and the culture



Originally posted on Himalayas