Senior Director, Client Operations

Openkrill; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Engine is redefining what business travel looks like. We seek a Senior Director, Client Operations to lead the full member support operation across Lodging, Flights, Cars, and Engine X, while guiding the Customer Advocacy Team and Elevate program.

This role demands hands-on leadership, strategic thinking, and a relentless focus on CSAT and retention. You will partner with Product and Engineering to scale operations, drive process improvements, and build a world-class support organization that

Qualifications

• 12+ years in customer operations or travel support with leadership experience
• Experience running US-based contact center operations with P&L responsibility
• Hands-on BPO management; vendor negotiations and transitions
• Experience in travel, hospitality, fintech, or complex booking environments
• Familiarity with modern support tooling (CRM, WFM, QA systems)

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end support performance across Lodging, Flights, Cars, and Engine X
• Lead a senior management team across verticals and shifts, including 24/7 coverage
• Be escalation owner for P1 incidents and high-severity situations
• Own Engine X support motions—billing disputes, KYC/KYB escalations, spend inquiries
• Partner with Product and Engineering to drive tooling, automation, and platform improvements
• Lead the Customer Advocacy Team and set service recovery standards
• Manage BPO partners across Travel Support and Engine X verticals
• Collaborate with OpEx Vendor Manager on contracts and headcount transitions

Skills

Customer obsession

Contact center leadership

24/7 operations

SLA management

BPO partnerships

Data-driven decisions

Job description

About Engine

Engine is the AI-native platform for intelligent travel. For a decade, Engine has built the proprietary technology and supply behind modern business travel, serving over 40,000 customers and nearly 2 million travelers, along with leading travel and AI companies that build on Engine's infrastructure. One system powers business travel, group travel, human agents, and AI agents.

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.

The Role

Engine is redefining what business travel looks like and the Senior Director, Client Operations is accountable for redefining what best-in-class travel support looks like alongside it. This role owns the full member support operation across Lodging, Flights, Cars, and Engine X, leads the Customer Advocacy Team, and architects the Elevate program that sets the standard for how Engine's highest-value customers experience the platform.

This isn't a role for someone who manages from a dashboard. We're looking for a player/coach; a leader who is as comfortable pulling up a case, jumping on a call with a stranded traveler, or diving into EVA containment data as they are running a QBR with their leadership team or presenting to the executive team. You set the standard by modeling it, not just by defining it.

At Engine, we don't benchmark against the industry, we make the industry benchmark against us. If your instinct is to hit 90% CSAT because that's what the industry calls good, this isn't the right seat. If your instinct is to ask why we're not at 95% and build the plan to get there, keep reading.

What You'll Own

Member Support: Lodging, Flights, Cars & Engine X

• Own and continuously improve end-to-end support performance across Lodging, Flights, Cars, and Engine X: CSAT, SLA, CRI rate, AHT, CPH, and contact rate
• Lead a senior management team across verticals and shifts, including 24/7 coverage across weekday, weekend, and after-hours operations
• Be the escalation owner for P1 incidents and high-severity customer situations, you are reachable and decisive when it matters
• Own the Engine X support motion end-to-end: card failures, spend management inquiries, application support, billing disputes, and KYC/KYB escalations — ensuring Engine X customers receive a support experience that matches the sophistication of the product
• Partner directly with Product and Engineering to drive the tooling, automation, and platform improvements that reduce avoidable contacts and improve agent capability across all four verticals

Customer Advocacy Team

• Lead the CAT team and set the bar for what exceptional service recovery looks like at Engine
• Own escalation SLAs, QA accuracy, and retention outcomes for the accounts and customers that land in this team
• Build the playbooks, escalation protocols, and account-specific strategies that prevent your best customers from churning

BPO & Vendor Operations

• Own the performance and commercial relationship with Engine's BPO partners across the Travel Support and Engine X verticals
• Hold vendors to Engine's quality standards — not their own — and elevate without hesitation when performance doesn't meet the bar
• Partner with the OpEx Vendor Manager to manage contracts, rate structures, and headcount transitions

What We're Looking For

You are customer obsessed, genuinely. Not as a value statement, but as an operating mode. You read case transcripts. You listen to call recordings. You know which hotel chains generate the most CRI volume and why. You treat every friction point in the customer journey as a personal problem to solve — whether that's a traveler stranded at check-in or a cardholder blocked from completing a transaction.

You have deep contact center DNA. You've built and run contact center operations in the US, and you've managed BPO partnerships at a meaningful scale. You know the difference between a workforce management problem and a quality problem. You've owned SLAs and missed them and learned exactly how to fix it. You've managed shift structures, handled overnight and weekend coverage gaps, and built the management layers that make 24/7 operations sustainable.

You are a player/coach. You don't manage from a distance. You are in the work — reviewing escalations, sitting with agents, pressure-testing SOPs, running post-mortems on P1 incidents. Your team looks to you not just for direction but for the standard. When something is hard, you go first.

You set standards, you don't chase them. Industry benchmarks are a floor for you, not a ceiling. You have strong opinions about what great looks like, you build toward it with urgency, and you measure progress relentlessly.

You are a continuous improvement practitioner. You use data to find problems before customers report them. You have experience implementing process improvement frameworks (Lean, Six Sigma, or equivalent). You build feedback loops — from QA to coaching to SOP to retraining — and you close them.

You build leaders, not just teams. The people who work for you get better. You give direct feedback, you invest in development, and you're known for producing leaders who go on to run their own operations.

Experience & Qualifications

• 12+ years in customer operations, contact center leadership, or travel support — with at least 5 years at the director level or above
• Proven experience running a US-based contact center operation with full P&L or cost accountability
• Hands‑on BPO management experience — vendor selection, performance management, commercial negotiations, and transitions
• Experience in travel, hospitality, fintech, or a high‑complexity booking and transaction environment strongly preferred
• Familiarity with modern support tooling — Salesforce Service Cloud, WFM platforms, AI-assisted support, and quality management systems
• Experience supporting financial products — corporate cards, expense management, billing operations, or payments — is a strong plus
• Experience building or scaling a premium or tiered support offering is a strong plus
• Strong analytical instincts — you are comfortable in data, know which metrics matter, and can translate numbers into operational decisions quickly

Why This Role, Why Now

Engine is at an inflection point. Gross bookings crossed $2B in annual GBV, Engine X is scaling fast, and the platform serves 33,000+ businesses. The support operation that got us here is good — but the support operation that takes us to the next level needs a different kind of leadership at the top. This role is the person who builds that. You'll have the scope, the resources, the executive support, and the mandate to make Engine's travel and spend support operation genuinely world-class. Not world-class by industry standards. World-class by the standards we set ourselves.