Senior Flights Inventory Operations Specialist

Perk•Chicago, IL

2d•$106,000 - $134,500•Hybrid

About The Position

Perk (formerly TravelPerk) is seeking a Senior Inventory Operations Specialist for its Inventory Operations team. This role focuses on ensuring the accuracy, reliability, and quality of travel and spend content on the platform, with a specific emphasis on flights, which are considered the highest-stakes inventory type. The specialist will be responsible for building systems, standards, and frameworks to sustain quality and scalability. This is a senior individual contributor role, not a management track. The position involves balancing short- and long-term priorities, using data strategically, and influencing product and tooling decisions. The specialist will shape team operations, coach others, and drive cross-functional initiatives. The role requires influencing teams without direct authority, based on expertise. The position is based in the Barcelona office three days a week and reports to the Director of Operations, working alongside other Inventory Ops specialists.

Requirements

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.
Expert technical knowledge of airline inventory, schedules, fares, availability, GDS and NDC content flows, plus the APIs and booking infrastructure that surface it.
Ability to anticipate how an airline schedule change or fare filing ripples through the ecosystem.
Ability to connect operational work to business outcomes and make trade-offs confidently.
Ability to see the big picture without losing sight of execution quality.
Experience mentoring others, even without formal management responsibility.
Proven ability to design frameworks and governance models that scale.

Responsibilities

Define operational standards that reduce BAU workload and increase reliability across teams and markets.
Lead retrospectives and drive scalable process refinements.
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.
Formulate analytical questions that reveal root causes and trends.
Synthesise complex insights into clear recommendations, and guide teammates in interpreting data accurately.
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.
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.
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.