Engineering Manager - AI & ML Automation at Perk

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 [Upgrade to PRO to see link] 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 [Upgrade to PRO to see link] to learn more. As an Engineering Manager at Perk, you will lead a specialized team dedicated to building and scaling features powered by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. You will ensure that we are not just 'adding AI' into the Perk product, but fundamentally re-imagining what Perk’s role can be in an agentic world and crafting a future of how users will interact with our ecosystem. In this hands-on leadership role, you'll grow talent, shape our technical vision, and partner cross-functionally to build delightful AI-powered user experiences. As an Engineering Manager, you will: - Being accountable for the delivery and personal development of your team(s) - Acting as servant leader to your engineers and adapting your leadership style to the needs of the situation - Taking care of individuals' performance in the organisation and supporting their journey and ownership of their career using coaching and mentoring where appropriate - Act as a technical champion, ensuring that the team has the time and context to build systems that meet the needs and standards of our organisation - Enabling fluent and effective collaboration within the team, and supporting them through challenges in system architecture, design or implementation - Develop and evolve a long-term strategy and roadmap for the team, working with the Product Manager and aligned with the Tribe mission. - Strategic team building and planning for delivering highly available features that scale with our growth - Being a key part of the recruitment and growth of the engineering team. - Working with the business and team metrics to deliver a 7 star experience to our customers. - An understanding of how engineering impacts product and business needs - Providing feedback to stakeholders within Builders (Product and Eng) and sometimes the wider business - Partner with research and product teams to translate advanced ML/AI capabilities into robust, scalable, production-ready systems. - Drive end-to-end technical strategy across model development, optimization, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring. - Champion best practices in experimentation, model governance, responsible AI, and performance optimization - Drive a culture of rapid, high-fidelity prototyping where the goal is to ‘fail fast’ in exploring agentic behaviors Required skills and experience: - You have around 5-8 years of experience managing software engineers - At least 2 years focused on teams building AI/ML-powered products. - For this role, we’re looking for someone who has managed (and will continue to) around 8-10 software engineers, including the ability to manage the distinct disciplines: Data Scientists, ML Engineers, and Full-Stack Engineers. - You come from a technical background - ideally in software engineering, where you were a hands-on IC. - You have experience with AI/ML system design, are comfortable discussing model evaluation, data pipelines, autonomous loops (OODA/ReAct patterns), and system architecture. - You are an active user of AI tools (e.g. Cursor, Claude Code, Gemini, OpenAI) to accelerate your output and you expect your team to do the same - You are a people manager who builds an effective work culture that improves the working lives of your team. - You have experience managing larger teams where it’s necessary to build processes and systems of delegation to get work done. - You act as a problem finder and solver technically and organisationally, helping the team to overcome any issue that prevents your engineering fellows to perform at their best. - You run effective performance reviews that celebrate achievements and help your team identify where to grow next in line with their aspirations and the needs of the business. - Pragmatism and obsession for simplicity, efficiency, and performance. - You have the ability to adapt and react fast to an ever-changing environment. 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 your resume in English if you choose to apply. Do not forget to submit 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 [Upgrade to PRO to see link] or @externalperk.com [Upgrade to PRO to see link] 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.