Engineering Manager - Indirect Channel (Direct Connect API & Web)

Avis Budget Group•Parsippany, NJ

2d•$130,000 - $160,000

About The Position

Avis Budget Group is seeking an experienced engineering leader to guide the architecture, engineering, modernization, and operation of large-scale enterprise applications and API platforms. The role focuses on evolving the company’s technology ecosystem toward a modern, API-first, cloud-native architecture while maintaining seamless integration with mainframe, GDS, reservation, fleet, rental, and enterprise systems. It combines enterprise architecture, engineering leadership, product delivery, and technology strategy, with influence across multiple engineering organizations and responsibility for business-critical platforms. The Engineering Manager will lead architecture and engineering strategy for distributed systems, enterprise APIs, GDS integrations, AWS and hybrid-cloud platforms, microservices, and legacy modernization. The role includes managing multiple engineering teams and technical leads, setting technical standards and roadmaps, supporting reliability and security, and partnering with product, architecture, infrastructure, security, data, DevOps, and business stakeholders. The position is based in Parsippany, New Jersey. The annual starting salary is $130,000–$160,000, with starting pay affected by factors including geography, skills, education, experience, and other qualifications.

Requirements

15–17+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, architecture, and technology leadership.
Significant experience architecting and managing large-scale enterprise applications and distributed platforms.
Proven experience leading multiple engineering teams and senior technical resources.
Deep expertise in API-first and API-led architecture.
Strong experience with API management platforms such as Apigee, 3scale, and RedSwift.
Extensive experience designing RESTful APIs, API gateways, API products, and enterprise integration platforms.
Strong understanding of GDS architecture and large-scale transaction processing.
Extensive experience with Java, Spring Boot, microservices, and distributed systems.
Significant hands-on experience with AWS architecture, including CDN/edge delivery and cloud-native services.
Experience designing hybrid architectures spanning AWS, on-premises, mainframe, and GDS environments.
Strong understanding of event-driven architecture, messaging, Kafka, and asynchronous integration patterns.
Experience with enterprise application modernization and legacy/mainframe transformation.
Strong knowledge of API security, OAuth2, OIDC, JWT, mTLS, rate limiting, and traffic management.
Demonstrated experience with high availability, scalability, performance engineering, and disaster recovery.
Strong understanding of DevOps, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, containers, and Kubernetes.
Excellent communication skills and ability to influence senior technical and business stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Experience architecting technology platforms within travel, transportation, mobility, hospitality, airline, rental-car, or similar high-volume transaction environments.
Experience with large-scale reservation, availability, pricing, booking, or distribution platforms.
Experience with AWS CloudFront and global edge architecture.
Experience with Apigee API Management and enterprise API governance.
Experience with RedSwift and/or 3scale API management ecosystems.
Experience with Kafka and event-streaming architectures.
Experience with Kubernetes/OpenShift and containerized enterprise applications.
Experience with observability platforms such as Splunk, Dynatrace, Datadog, or equivalent.
Experience implementing Domain-Driven Design and enterprise integration patterns.
Experience with mainframe technologies including COBOL, CICS, DB2, and JCL.
Experience managing large technology transformation programs involving multiple platforms and engineering organizations.

Responsibilities

Provide technical leadership for the architecture and engineering of large-scale, mission-critical applications and platforms.
Define enterprise application architecture strategies aligned with business objectives, technology roadmaps, and modernization goals.
Architect scalable, resilient, secure, and highly available distributed systems for high transaction volumes and critical customer journeys.
Establish architectural standards and reference architectures for microservices, APIs, event-driven systems, cloud platforms, and enterprise integration.
Lead architecture reviews and provide technical direction across engineering teams and technology domains.
Translate business requirements into technical architectures and engineering roadmaps; identify architectural risks, technical debt, and modernization opportunities.
Guide technology decisions involving build versus buy, platform capabilities, integration patterns, and modernization approaches.
Own and evolve enterprise API strategy and platforms, including API design, governance, versioning, lifecycle management, security, discoverability, throttling, monetization, and observability.
Design API products and gateway strategies supporting digital channels, mobile applications, GDS platforms, partners, internal systems, and hybrid environments.
Establish API security, resiliency, reuse, standardization, SLAs, SLOs, performance standards, and operational governance.
Lead GDS architecture and integration with digital platforms, reservation, rental, availability, pricing, customer, fleet, partner, mainframe, Java microservices, and cloud systems.
Modernize GDS and legacy integrations using API-first and event-driven approaches while maintaining business continuity and transactional integrity.
Architect AWS and hybrid-cloud modernization, including cloud-native services, CDN and edge delivery, traffic management, caching, load balancing, security, disaster recovery, observability, and performance.
Lead transformation of monolithic and legacy applications into domain-aligned microservices and distributed systems; define service boundaries and synchronous and asynchronous communication patterns.
Promote event-driven architecture, distributed transaction and consistency patterns, service discovery, configuration management, fault tolerance, and Java/Spring Boot engineering standards.
Develop mainframe and legacy modernization strategies, including API façade and strangler-pattern approaches, while preserving critical business capabilities and operational stability.
Lead multiple engineering teams and technical leads; foster engineering excellence, accountability, innovation, and continuous improvement.
Mentor senior engineers, architects, and engineering managers; establish career development, technical growth, and succession strategies.
Partner with Product, Enterprise Architecture, Infrastructure, Security, Data, DevOps, and business stakeholders; manage complex multi-team programs and dependencies.
Establish engineering operating models for geographically distributed teams and drive Agile delivery while balancing short-term delivery with long-term sustainability.
Establish reliability engineering, performance engineering, capacity planning, disaster recovery, observability, SLOs, SLIs, operational KPIs, and production readiness practices.
Lead responses to complex production incidents and systemic reliability issues; drive performance testing, chaos/resiliency testing, and operational readiness.
Establish security architecture and API security policies, partnering with cybersecurity and enterprise architecture teams on Zero Trust, defense in depth, and secure software development practices.