Director, Groups & Events

About this role

About Engine

Engine is the all-in-one travel and spend management platform trusted by 38K+ businesses and groups representing 1.8M+ travelers. We're the retailer and the rails of business travel, the fastest-growing company in travel tech, built on a decade of proprietary technology, supply, and pricing no one else can replicate. Other travel and AI companies run on our infrastructure to book real trips, hold rates, and move payments, without building any of it themselves. We built it, AI-forward at every layer, from how travelers book to how the rails run.

That work has earned recognition as one of Fast Company's Best Workplaces for Innovators (2025), TravelTech's Reservation Platform of the Year (2026), and one of Built In's Best Places to Work (2020–2026).

We're looking for bold, ambitious people to help redefine how businesses manage and experience travel. Working here, you can expect exponential growth, an ambitious pace, full ownership, and high-caliber colleagues who push you to do the best work of your career. Every hire raises the bar.

Come outpace the ordinary and build the future of travel with us.

About the Role

We're looking for a Director of Groups & Events to lead our Groups Contracts and Groups Bookings teams. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who thrives in the details as much as in the strategy — someone who doesn't just oversee the work but genuinely understands it, can step into it, and uses that proximity to make the team and the customer experience meaningfully better every day.

You'll own the end-to-end support experience for group travel, from contract management through booking execution, and you'll bring the rare combination of operational depth, people leadership, and strategic clarity that this function requires. You know the workflows. You know where the friction lives. And you build the systems, the culture, and the team capability to eliminate it.

At Engine, we don't aim to meet industry benchmarks — we aim to make the industry benchmark against us. This role is for someone who holds themselves and their team to that standard.

What You'll Do

Lead and develop the Groups Contracts and Groups Bookings teams. You own performance, culture, and day-to-day operations across both teams. You develop your managers and leads with directness and intention — giving real feedback, building real capability, and creating the conditions for people to do the best work of their careers. The leaders who come up under you go on to run their own functions.

Be a player/coach and power user. You don't manage from a distance. You maintain deep, current working knowledge of end-to-end group handling — from initial inquiry and contract execution through booking confirmation and post-travel support. You can pull up a contract, work a complex case, navigate the systems your team uses every day, and identify exactly where the experience breaks down. Your proximity to the work is not occasional — it's how you lead. When a high-stakes situation arises, you're in it, not watching from the sidelines.

Drive continuous improvement relentlessly. You use data and direct observation to find problems before customers report them. You build feedback loops — from QA audits to coaching sessions to SOP rewrites to retraining cycles — and you close them. You don't flag issues and wait for someone else to fix them. You identify the root cause, build the solution, and measure whether it worked. Process improvement isn't a project for you — it's an operating mode.

Own the operational metrics. Establish baselines, track performance, and hold the team accountable to clear and measurable outcomes — booking conversion rate, L90 median timing, QA scores, SLA performance, and client satisfaction. You know which numbers matter, what's driving them, and what it takes to move them.

Manage BPO vendor performance. You have experience running BPO partnerships and you bring that discipline to the Groups function. You hold external partners to Engine's quality standards — not theirs — and you know the difference between a vendor that needs coaching and a vendor that needs accountability. You manage performance cadences, escalate when the bar isn't being met, and work with the OpEx Vendor Manager on contracts and transitions. You've been on the ground with a BPO partner and you know what good looks like at the agent level, not just the reporting level.

Be the senior escalation point. For complex group contracts, high-stakes client situations, and cross-functional issues that require experienced judgment — you're the person who gets the call. You resolve with speed and confidence, you document what happened and why, and you use every escalation as an input into making the system better.

Partner cross-functionally. Work closely with Sales, Account Management, and Finance to ensure group programs are set up for success and clients are supported throughout the lifecycle. You're not a handoff point — you're a genuine partner who brings operational insight into commercial conversations and vice versa.

Contribute to the broader Member Support strategy. Bring a groups-specific lens to decisions that affect the wider organization. You're a peer on the leadership team, not just a functional operator — and you use that seat to make Client Ops better across the board.

What We're Looking For

You are customer obsessed — operationally, not rhetorically. You read case transcripts. You sit with agents. You've called a hotel on behalf of a client to understand what the experience actually feels like on the other end. You treat friction in the customer journey as a personal problem to solve, and you build teams that feel the same way. For you, customer obsession isn't a value on a wall — it's visible in every process decision you make.

You are a true player/coach. You lead by modeling. You're not above rolling up your sleeves, working a complex group contract, or jumping on a call with a client when it ma

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