Senior Flights Inventory Operations Specialist

Traveltechessentialist; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 106,000 - 135,000; Full time

Job summary

Perk is hiring a Senior Inventory Operations Specialist to elevate airline inventory reliability and scalability. You will define standards, influence product choices, and partner across teams to improve data quality and supplier feeds.

Based in Barcelona, three days per week on-site, with relocation support available for eligible roles. You will balance short- and long-term priorities, coach colleagues, and help shape how inventory performance drives revenue.

Qualifications

• Operational depth in flights or airline inventory workflows end-to-end.
• Domain mastery of airline inventory, schedules, fares, and GDS/NDC content flows.
• Strategic thinking that links operations to business outcomes.
• Experience mentoring others, even without formal management responsibility.
• Proven ability to design scalable frameworks and governance models.

Responsibilities

• Define operational standards to reduce BAU workload and increase reliability across teams and markets.
• Balance domain and company goals, set ambitious OKRs, redirect focus when needed.
• Formulate analytical questions and translate insights into clear recommendations.
• Influence product and tooling decisions; build governance that scales across markets.
• Drive automation and reporting cadence to tie inventory reliability to revenue impact for stakeholders.
• Define and evaluate AI-assisted workflows for supplier-content triage and anomaly detection.

Skills

Operational depth

Domain mastery

Strategic thinking

Coaching ability

Process design

Job description

About Us

Perk (formerly TravelPerk) is the intelligent platform for travel and spend management. Built to tackle the time-consuming, manual work that gets in the way of real work, our tools automate everything from travel bookings to expenses, invoice processing, and more. By eliminating this shadow work that wastes hours, erodes morale, and saps innovation, we’re on a mission to power real work, with real impact.

We’re trusted by more than 10,000 companies worldwide, including Wise, On Running, Breitling, and Fabletics, and we’re tackling the 7 hours of lost productivity per employee each week, a $1.7 trillion problem.

Founded in 2015, Perk has grown into a global company of more than 1,800 people across 12 offices globally, with headquarters in London and Boston. We combine innovation, control, and simplicity to transform how businesses work and how people feel at work.

At Perk, we’re driven by our values, like being an owner, delivering a 7-star experience, and working as one team. We value curiosity, purpose, and mindset, not just knowledge, to unlock the power in your potential. Our talent team brings together leading minds from the travel and SaaS industries, representing over 70 countries. If you’re excited about having a real impact and shaping how millions of people experience work, we’d love you on the team.

Visit www.perk.com to learn more.

At Perk, our Inventory Operations team ensures the travel and spend content powering our platform is accurate, reliable, and high-quality. We're hiring a Senior Inventory Operations Specialist to raise the bar on how we operate, building the systems, standards, and frameworks that sustain quality and scalability across the domain. Flights are the highest-stakes inventory type we manage: schedule changes, fare rules, and GDS/NDC supplier feeds all have to reconcile in real time, with zero tolerance for stale or wrong data reaching a booking. This is a senior IC role, not a management track.

You'll balance short- and long-term priorities, use data as a strategic asset, and influence product and tooling decisions. You won't just deliver your own work; you'll shape how the team operates, coach others, and drive cross-functional initiatives with lasting impact on inventory performance and reliability. The challenge: you'll be setting standards for teams you don't manage, so your influence has to come from being right, not from authority. Based in our Barcelona office three days a week, you'll report to our Director of Operations, alongside 8 other Inventory Ops specialists.

What You’ll Do

• Set the Standard: Define operational standards that reduce BAU workload and increase reliability across teams and markets. Lead retrospectives and drive scalable process refinements.
• Think and Act Strategically: Balance domain and company goals, making trade-offs with business impact in mind. Set ambitious OKRs and recognise when diminishing returns mean it's time to redirect focus.
• Turn Data into Direction: Formulate analytical questions that reveal root causes and trends. Synthesise complex insights into clear recommendations, and guide teammates in interpreting data accurately.
• Shape the Inventory Domain: Anticipate how airline schedule changes, fare filings, or supplier feed updates affect performance. Influence product and tooling decisions, define technical standards, and build governance frameworks that scale across markets.
• Own the Reporting Cadence: Drive automation, monitoring, and workflow improvements that span multiple teams. Own the cadence that ties inventory reliability (uptime, content accuracy rate) directly to revenue impact for senior stakeholders.
• Own the AI Loop: Build and evaluate AI-assisted workflows for supplier-content triage and anomaly detection, define what "good" looks like, set guardrails for auto-actioned changes, and make the build-vs-buy call on tooling.

What You’ll Need

• Operational Depth: You've owned a flights or airline-inventory workflow end to end, schedules, fares, or GDS/NDC content, not just executed steps someone else designed, and can point to where you expanded its scope.
• Domain Mastery: Expert technical knowledge of airline inventory, schedules, fares, availability, GDS and NDC content flows, plus the APIs and booking infrastructure that surface it. You can anticipate how an airline schedule change or fare filing ripples through the ecosystem.
• Strategic Thinking: You connect operational work to business outcomes and make trade-offs confidently. You see the big picture without losing sight of execution quality.
• Coaching Ability: Experience mentoring others, even without formal management responsibility. You raise the bar for those around you.
• Process Design Expertise: Proven ability to design frameworks and governance models that scale,

Compensation

Compensation for this role is a combination of salary and stock options. The anticipated base salary range is $106,00 - $134,500 per year. Actual compensation may vary based on specific qualifications, experience, and other job-related factors.

How We Work

At Perk, we take an IRL-first approach to work, where our team works together in-person 3 days a week. As such, this role requires you to be based within commuting distance of our hubs. We fundamentally believe in the value of meeting in real life to improve connectivity, productivity, creativity and ultimately making us a great place to work.

For certain roles, we can help with relocation from anywhere in the world, English is the official language at the office. Please submit a portfolio if you choose to apply. We’ll also ask for an updated portfolio and/or resume.

Perk is a global company with a diverse customer base, and we want to make sure the people behind our product reflect that. We’re an equal opportunity employer, which means you’re welcome at Perk regardless of how you look, where you’re from, or anything else that makes you, well, you.

Protect Yourself from Recruitment Scams

All official communication from Perk will always come from email addresses ending in @perk.com or @externalperk.com, our verified social media channels, or recruiters listed on our official LinkedIn page. We will never ask you to pay for equipment, training, or fees, request sensitive personal information such as bank details early in the process, or communicate through unofficial apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal. If you receive a message claiming to be from Perk that seems suspicious, please do not respond. Forward it to security [at] perk .com, and we will confirm whether it is legitimate.