Technical Leader and Manager, Platform & Data (TakeUp)

About Us

TakeUp, LLC is revolutionizing revenue optimization for hospitality with a daring approach to pricing. Using AI and machine learning, TakeUp empowers independent operators to unlock maximum revenue potential through pricing courageously—day in, day out. Seamlessly integrated with top Property Management Systems, our platform replaces traditional rate-setting constraints with data-driven confidence, delivering an impressive 10-15x ROI.

The Opportunity

We’re extending our impact beyond pricing to help independent operators capture more revenue across the guest journey. To power this expansion, we’re hiring a Technical Lead and Manager, Platform & Data to lead the platform and data teams responsible for the core services, data layers, and end-to-end data flow behind the TakeUp system. You will be a player–coach who pairs clear technical leadership with hands-on contributions—owning reliability, performance, data quality, and the engineering standards that let product and ML teams move fast with confidence. This role reports to the CTO and partners closely with Product, ML, and Customer Success, as well as select PMS and booking-engine partners.

What You’ll Do
Technical vision and architecture

• Own the platform architecture for core services and data: ingestion → transformation → storage → serving → observability.
• Define data contracts and schemas between ingestion, transformations (e.g., dbt), ML features, and downstream applications.
• Establish standards for orchestration, CI/CD, code quality, documentation, and reproducibility across platform and data repos.
• Set and enforce SLOs for reliability, latency, and data freshness; implement guardrails and automated quality checks.
• Drive cost-aware design (compute/storage) and performance tuning for batch and streaming workloads.

Delivery and execution

• Translate the roadmap into scoped work with crisp acceptance criteria, success metrics, and rollout plans.
• Prioritize, sequence, and unblock; keep WIP small; ship iteratively with progressive delivery and clear rollback paths.
• Coordinate cross-team dependencies (Product, ML, Integrations) to keep the value stream flowing end-to-end.
• Build and operate a pragmatic observability stack (logs, metrics, tracing, data quality monitors) with alerting that engineers trust.

Product and stakeholder partnership

• Align technical choices with customer outcomes: reliability of rate delivery, freshness/accuracy of data, speed of iteration.
• Partner with Integrations on PMS/booking-engine data flows; design resilient interfaces and backfills.

People leadership: hiring and onboarding

• Shape the team (platform engineers, data engineers, integrations engineers); partner with recruiting; run a structured loop.
• Document engineering standards: coding conventions, review SLAs, on-call expectations, incident hygiene.
• Run weekly 1:1s with agendas (wins, blockers, quality, growth); capture actions and follow through.
• Give timely, specific feedback; escalate early when expectations are at risk.
• Co-create development plans tied to business outcomes; allocate learning time/budget.
• Manage underperformance with clear expectations, support plans, and review cadence.
• Define acceptance criteria and success metrics up front; review PRs promptly.
• Actively unblock; renegotiate scope/timelines early; protect maker time.
• Track commitments and outcomes; celebrate impact, not just output.

Documentation and knowledge sharing

• Keep architecture diagrams, runbooks, READMEs, and data lineage current.
• Promote a “docs-as-code” culture; ensure changes to interfaces include migration notes and examples.

Stakeholder communication

• Provide weekly progress, risks, and asks to the CTO; share monthly demos/notes with broader stakeholders.

Who You Are

• 6+ years building and operating production platforms and data systems in B2B SaaS; 2+ years leading engineers.
• Strong technical depth in several of: Python, SQL, orchestration (e.g., Prefect/Airflow), ELT (e.g., dbt), cloud data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake/BigQuery), event streaming (e.g., Kafka/Kinesis), containerization and service orchestration (e.g., Docker, ECS/Kubernetes), infra-as-code (e.g., Terraform).
• Proven track record setting engineering standards (CI/CD, code review, trunk-based dev, testing strategy) and delivering reliable, observable systems at reasonable cost.
• Experience defining and meeting SLOs; comfortable with incident management and continuous improvement.
• Comfortable partnering on third-party integrations; you design resilient interfaces and plan for schema drift and backfills.
• Clear, concise communicator who can simplify complexity, make trade-offs explicit, and align teams.
• Start-up mindset: bias for action, comfort with ambiguity, and willingness to be both strategic and hands-on.

Illustrative Stack (Not Required)

Python, SQL; Snowflake; dbt; Prefect; AWS (ECS/Lambda/S3/CloudWatch); Terraform; GitHub Actions.

Nice to Have

• Domain knowledge in pricing, demand modeling, or hospitality.
• Former start-up experience.

Why TakeUp?

At TakeUp, we empower our team to innovate, grow, and succeed. You’ll join a passionate group of professionals who are committed to changing the way businesses run. This is mission-driven work: we’re empowering independent inns and small hotels, businesses often underserved and outgunned by enterprise competitors, with technology that levels the playing field.

Ready to take your career to the next level with a fast-growing SaaS company? Apply now and let's make an impact together!

Travel

This role is remote. While flexibility is key, we also value in-person connections. Travel may be needed for customer discovery, team building, and/or networking.