Hotel Stay Engineering & Technical Operations, Director

The Hotel Stay Engineering & Technical Operations, Director will own the end-to-end technical governance, operational stability, and architectural integrity of all Digital Guest Experience solutions across global markets.

This role is accountable for technical readiness, production reliability, vendor technical performance, and post-launch technical health. It ensures solutions are not only feasible and market-ready, but stable, well-architected, and operationally resilient at scale.

Your Day to Day

• Technical Oversight & Enablement: Lead a team of engineers, localization specialists, and technical vendor resources responsible for feasibility assessment, site-readiness evaluation, and technical validation, define and enforce technical readiness standards for all Digital Guest Experience solutions, maintain technical design documents, integration diagrams, and system dependency maps,
• Technology Leadership: Act as the technical counterpart to Stay Product/Program Directors, providing early input on feasibility, scalability, integration risks, and regional considerations during product design and planning, provide executive-level reporting on technical health, incident trends, and risk posture, partner with Enterprise Architecture and Information Security to ensure Stay products align with enterprise standards, security expectations, and integration patterns.
• Production Stability & TechOps Governance: Own technical operations for in-market stay solutions, establish and oversee incident escalation frameworks and response models, lead root cause analysis oversight for major incidents and ensure corrective actions are implemented, monitor production reliability metrics and vendor technical SLA adherence, drive systemic improvements to reduce recurring outages and post-launch defects. May require off-hours response to major incidents.
• Release Readiness & Launch Gate Authority: Define and enforce technical go-live criteria, approve technical readiness prior to global deployment, ensure adequate testing, environment validation, and rollback planning exist before release, partner with Product to balance speed-to-market with stability and risk mitigation.
• Vendor Technical Performance & Accountability: Lead technical performance governance across strategic vendors, oversee vendor SLAs related to uptime, response times, defect resolution, and release quality, partner with Product & Procurement to escalate and remediate underperformance, ensure vendors maintain accurate technical documentation and escalation paths.
• Regional Technical Operations Alignment: Establish a structured operating model with regional technical leads, evaluate regional IT landscapes, regulatory constraints, and operational realities to feed product roadmaps, launch & ongoing governance plans, ensure global standards are upheld while accounting for local operational constraints,
• Risk, Dependency & Scalability Management: Maintain a portfolio-level view of technical risks and dependencies, identify systemic infrastructure or integration weaknesses, develop multi-year roadmap for improving technical resilience, scalability, and modernization.

What We Need from You

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Information Technology, Engineering, Computer Science, or a relevant field of work, or an equivalent combination of education and work-related experienced.
• 10+ years of experience in hotel technology, infrastructure, enterprise systems, or technical consulting
• Proven experience assessing technical feasibility and readiness for large-scale digital solutions, technical writing and documentation, and architecture design
• Experience working across diverse regional technology environments and regulatory landscapes
• Demonstrated success leading technical or enablement teams in a matrixed organization
• Strong experience partnering with Product and Architecture teams
• Experience working on guest-facing technologies and infrastructure in a hotel environment, particularly with focus on Digital Key, Wi-Fi, and/or In-Room Entertainment solutions.

Travel - 10%

Location - Atlanta, GA: Our hybrid work structure is an expectation of three (3) days a week in office. This expectation may be adjusted to evolve with the changing needs of the business.

The salary range for this role is $145,000.00 to $175,000.00. This role is also eligible for bonus pay (as applicable). We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off, medical/dental/vision insurance, 401K, and other benefits to employees.

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At IHG, we've made a promise. As one of the world's leading hotel groups, we're here to deliver True Hospitality for Good. Making our guests and colleagues feel welcome, cared for, recognised and respected - wherever they are in the world. Want to be part of the journey?