Director of Product (Foundations)

• As Director of Product, Foundations, you will lead the Foundations product organisation within Marketplace Product Experience, owning the strategy and direction for the shared digital experience platform that every Booking.com experience team builds on
• The mission is simple and high‑leverage: enable other teams to move faster by providing reliable, reusable, AI-first platform capabilities — so missions and verticals spend their energy on differentiated customer value rather than rebuilding undifferentiated infrastructure
• Operating at Product Director scope, you are responsible for multiple platform product groups: Experience Infrastructure, Experience Content and Experience UI, plus cross‑platform orchestration — and accountable for customer impact, business impact and Product Quality / Excellence across the portfolio
• Because Foundations is a horizontal enabler, your success is measured as much by the leverage, adoption and velocity you create for consuming teams as by the platforms themselves
• Own the Foundations platform strategy and set a clear 18 month direction for the shared digital experience platform, translating company, Marketplace and Tech Enablement strategy into a prioritised platform portfolio with sharp build/buy/reuse trade‑offs
• Define the strategic narrative and sequencing of major platform bets across Experience Infrastructure, Experience Content, Experience UI and orchestration, including where AI becomes a first‑class platform capability
• Own department‑level outcomes and a measurable performance narrative built on platform leverage metrics — adoption, consuming‑team velocity, reuse, reliability, total cost of ownership and reduction of duplicated logic — linked to the customer and business outcomes the platforms enable
• Lead the Foundations organisation across multiple platform product groups, driving multi‑year planning and resource allocation while balancing near‑term enablement needs with long‑term architecture investment
• Ensure delivery excellence and raise the bar on product quality — reliability, maintainability, compliance, cost efficiency, operational health and adherence to NFRs — for capabilities that the whole company depends on
• Lead the migration from fragmented, team‑specific infrastructure, content and UI toward shared, reusable platforms, ensuring capabilities are operationally ready, well‑documented and adopted, and that duplicated and legacy implementations are deprecated
• Partner with Engineering leadership on multi‑year architectural investment decisions that shape the experience platform, the content stack, the UI/design‑system foundations and the orchestration layer, and their fit within Booking.com’s broader technology direction
• Run a disciplined platform‑as‑a‑service operating model with consuming teams: clear contracts, SLAs, intake and prioritisation, roadmaps and adoption commitments, so platform investment tracks real consuming‑team demand and company‑level leverage
• Lead complex cross‑BU initiatives where platform decisions intersect with missions, verticals and platform teams across the company, and represent Foundations in VP / SVP‑level forums with clear options, trade‑offs and decision requests
• Develop leaders, design and evolve the organisation structure so scope, decision ownership and accountability are clear, and hire, coach and performance‑manage senior PMs and GPMs for strong team and portfolio health
• Lead as a true people manager with clear delegation and direct feedback, and contribute beyond core scope to Marketplace PX, platform craft and the wider PM craft — including platform product standards, AI product thinking and reusable practices
• Own Experience Infrastructure as the reliable, scalable runtime, rendering, delivery and experimentation foundation that consuming experiences are built on, spanning: Data Access — the federated data mediation layer that gives product teams governed, discoverable, privacy‑compliant data and reduces cognitive load; Gateway & Traffic Enrichment — the unified entry, routing and deep‑linking layer that enriches traveller traffic with standardised Common Request Context for consistent, secure, observable handling across verticals; and App Build & Release — the end‑to‑end mobile delivery pipeline (CI/CD, release orchestration and SRE) that drives reliability, self‑service releases and faster, safer mobile delivery at 125M+ MAU scale
• Own Experience Content platforms so content can be authored once and delivered consistently across surfaces and locales, spanning: Content Moderation — scalable integrity, compliance and governance workflows that keep user‑ and partner‑generated content safe and legally compliant; Localization — the translation and multilingual delivery infrastructure that powers locally relevant experiences at scale; and Content Generation — large‑scale text and visual content, GenAI creation workflows and writing systems that deliver relevance and consistency efficiently across journeys
• Own Experience UI — the reusable component library, design system, screen composition and front‑end frameworks — so teams build consistent, accessible, high‑quality interfaces faster, with consistency across web and app
• Own the orchestration layer that lets infrastructure, content and UI capabilities be composed into experiences, exposing clear contracts and self‑service tooling so consuming teams can assemble experiences quickly
• Steward the conversational foundations that bring Conversational AI across the traveller journey, providing the shared, reusable building blocks (and integration into the MP AI north‑star architecture) that let conversational experiences be built and scaled consistently rather than rebuilt per use case
• Make AI a first‑class platform capability, partnering with Engineering, Data and ML leaders to embed AI/ML and GenAI into infrastructure, content, UI and conversational foundations with responsible‑AI guardrails, so consuming teams inherit safe, scalable AI by default
• Establish shared platform principles, adoption playbooks, versioning and deprecation discipline, and a feedback loop with consuming teams so the platform continuously improves against real usage

Benefits

• Health insurance
• Free access to Headspace for you and your loved ones
• Global Employee Assistance Program
• Meditation and Breastfeeding rooms at the office
• Booking Cares - 2 days per year to volunteer and learn
• Life insurance
• Disability insurance
• Pension plan
• Annual paid time off
• Parental leave - 22 weeks
• Grandparent leave - 10 days
• Care leave - 10 days
• Bereavement leave - up to 4 weeks
• Anniversary leave
• Working from Home Furniture and Ergonomic Support
• Working from Abroad - up to 20 days per year
• Discounts & Wallet credits to spend on our products
• Upgrade to Booking.com Genius Level 3
• Friends & Family Booking.com discount vouchers
• Free access to online learning platforms
• Development and mentorship programs to support career growth
• Access to trainings and workshops
• Team development opportunities
• Local discount programs
• Game rooms in offices
• On-site meals, coffee and snacks including vegan options- Strong Applied AI Product Proficiency and Tech Fluency: able to evaluate where AI becomes a platform capability, govern responsible AI use, and partner deeply on architecture, reliability, maintainability and long‑term technical health
• A track record in platform, infrastructure, developer‑tooling, content platform or design‑system / UI platform product at scale, ideally where the customers were internal teams and success was measured in adoption, leverage and velocity
• Extensive product leadership experience (10+ years), including several years leading multiple PM teams and managers at Product Director scope (multiple product groups, multi‑year strategy, complex cross‑BU initiatives) in a complex, global environment
• Strong platform product thinking: comfortable running a platform‑as‑a‑service model with contracts, SLAs, intake/prioritisation and adoption strategy, and reasoning in terms of reuse, total cost of ownership, build/buy/reuse and duplication reduction
• Excellent stakeholder leadership and Strategic Thinking, able to influence senior leaders and consuming teams through structured narratives, options and clear decision framing. Strong command of English, written and spoken
• Background in travel, marketplaces or large consumer digital products, working at the intersection of platform capabilities, content systems, front‑end/design systems, AI / ML systems and the experience teams that consume them