Engineering Lead, Platform — KabuK Exchange

KabuK Style is building the next generation infrastructure for the global travel industry. Our flagship product, HafH, already connects over 30,000 accommodations across 130+ countries and serves a rapidly growing international customer base. As we scale, we are developing a new B2B platform that powers travel distribution, supplier integrations, pricing optimization, and booking infrastructure for partners around the world. ------------------------------------------- <About KabuK Exchange> KabuK Exchange is a B2B2B travel distribution platform being built by KabuK Style to connect Japanese hotel supply with global demand channels, while also enabling redistribution of third-party travel inventory through modern APIs, pricing, booking, billing, and integration infrastructure. We are building the platform layer that will support hotel distribution, supplier connectivity, channel integrations, pricing logic, booking reliability, payment and billing flows, and future travel commerce products across hotels, flights, activities, and related services. This is a foundational role for someone who wants to help design and lead the engineering architecture behind a high-impact travel technology platform from an early stage. ------------------------------------------- <Role Overview> We are looking for an Engineering Lead, Platform to provide hands-on technical leadership for KabuK Exchange. This person will work directly with the Head of Platform and closely with product, QA, company leadership, internal engineers, and outsourced engineering partners. The role will own core architecture decisions, guide backend and platform engineering standards, and help ensure the engineering team can deliver scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems. This is not a pure people-management role. We are looking for someone who can operate as a senior technical leader: reviewing architecture, guiding implementation, improving engineering quality, mentoring engineers, and helping turn product and business requirements into strong technical systems. The ideal candidate is comfortable working close to leadership, understands how to balance business needs with technical quality, and can help guide a platform from early-stage delivery toward long-term scalability. ------------------------------------------- <Responsibilities> - Own and guide the technical architecture of KabuK Exchange’s platform services. - Lead backend and platform engineering decisions across internal and outsourced engineering teams. - Translate product requirements and business goals into scalable technical designs. - Define service boundaries, API design principles, integration patterns, and engineering standards. - Guide architecture for core travel platform domains such as pricing, inventory, booking, reservations, supplier integrations, channel distribution, billing, and payments. - Review technical designs, code quality, implementation plans, and delivery risks. - Work closely with Product Managers, QA, and leadership to improve requirements quality, delivery predictability, and system reliability. - Help establish engineering practices around documentation, testing, observability, release management, and incident prevention. - Mentor engineers and help raise the technical bar across the team. - Provide light management, technical coordination, and delivery guidance across internal engineers and external development partners. - Support hiring and future team-building as the platform organization grows. - Help identify technical risks early and propose practical solutions before they become delivery or operational issues. - Partner with the Head of Platform on technical roadmap planning, architecture prioritization, and long-term platform strategy. ------------------------------------------- <Why Join> - Help build a foundational B2B2B travel distribution platform from an early stage. - Work directly with platform leadership and influence core technical direction. - Own architecture across critical travel commerce domains including inventory, pricing, booking, integrations, billing, and payments. - Join a team focused on connecting Japanese hospitality supply to broader global distribution. - Play a major role in shaping engineering standards, team structure, and platform scalability. - Work on complex platform problems involving travel inventory, supplier connectivity, pricing logic, reservation reliability, and financial workflows. - Join a role with meaningful ownership, visibility, and long-term growth potential.

- Strong backend or platform engineering experience, ideally in a senior engineer, tech lead, platform lead, or engineering lead role. - Experience designing and building distributed systems, APIs, integrations, or high-transaction backend services. - Ability to own architecture decisions and communicate tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. - Strong understanding of backend engineering principles, system design, data modeling, reliability, and maintainability. - Experience working in or around a C# / .NET environment, or the ability to become productive in one quickly. - Experience with cloud-native systems, preferably AWS. - Strong API design and third-party integration experience. - Ability to lead technically across a mixed team of internal engineers and outsourced development partners. - Comfortable working closely with product, QA, and business stakeholders. - Conversational English communication ability. - Based in Japan and able to work closely with teams and leadership in Japan time zones.

- Experience with Go, Java, or other modern backend languages. - Experience modernizing or evolving a platform from an existing .NET/C# foundation toward a broader service-oriented or cloud-native architecture. - Experience in travel technology, hotel distribution, OTA systems, channel managers, booking engines, marketplaces, payments, billing, fintech, logistics, or other complex transaction platforms. - Experience with event-driven architecture, message queues, asynchronous processing, or microservices. - Experience with pricing, inventory, reservation, payment, ledger, reconciliation, or financial correctness systems. - Experience working with React-based frontend teams. - Experience improving engineering processes for hybrid teams, outsourced engineering teams, or early-stage platform organizations. - Experience building systems where reliability, operational visibility, and financial correctness are critical. - Japanese or Korean language ability is welcome, but not required.

You may be a strong fit if you: - Enjoy being close to both business strategy and technical execution. - Can design architecture, but are also comfortable reviewing implementation details. - Prefer pragmatic engineering over abstract architecture. - Know how to work with product and QA to reduce ambiguity before engineers start building. - Can lead engineers without needing formal authority over every person on the team. - Are comfortable operating in a fast-moving environment where systems, processes, and teams are still being built. - Can work effectively with both internal employees and outsourced engineering partners. - Care about building systems that are scalable, maintainable, observable, and commercially useful. - Want to help build the core infrastructure for a travel distribution platform with regional depth in Japan and global commercial potential.