Senior Platform Engineer: Data & Orchestration in London

Grapevine is an AI-powered growth engine for managed business travel. We help travel management companies and corporate travel programmes identify missed booking opportunities and proactively support travellers to complete bookings within approved channels. By analysing live booking data and traveller behaviour, Grapevine identifies opportunities such as missing hotels after flights, ground transport needs, airport parking and other travel ancillaries. The platform then engages travellers at the right moment through a combination of proactive communications and multi-channel conversational AI support, helping TMCs capture more revenue while improving traveller experience, policy compliance and visibility.

Under the hood, Grapevine is a real-time travel data, content and orchestration platform. We ingest booking data from multiple GDS and back-office systems, combine it with travel content from suppliers such as hotel, airline and ground transport providers, normalise that into a unified model, and generate live events that power traveller journeys, integrations and reporting. At the core of the platform is a focus on building a complete and accurate view of travel data, ensuring that what we capture, process and play back to clients and travellers is reliable, consistent and actionable.

The Role

We are looking for a hands‑on engineer to own and evolve the core data, content and orchestration layer that powers Grapevine. This role sits at the centre of the platform. You will work across travel data ingestion, supplier content integration, event generation, multi‑channel messaging orchestration, and reporting infrastructure. You will help ensure the system remains robust, maintainable and scalable as we onboard more customers and expand what the platform can do. A key part of the role is ensuring that the underlying data is accurate, complete and reliable, as this underpins everything from traveller communications to reporting and client value.

A core challenge in the platform is how we combine structured, deterministic workflows with conversational AI. We are building systems that coordinate booking flows such as hotels, taxis and parking with real‑time data and third‑party APIs, while layering in conversational interfaces across multiple channels. Ensuring those flows are reliable, consistent and scalable is central to the role. This is not a narrow ticket‑taking role. We are looking for someone who is comfortable taking ownership of problems, exploring solutions, improving systems over time, and helping shape how the platform evolves.

What You’ll Work On

• Travel Data & Content Integration
  • Ingest booking and traveller data from GDS and back‑office systems such as Sabre, Amadeus and Travelport
  • Integrate travel content from suppliers including hotels, airlines and ground transport providers
  • Normalise data and content into a consistent, accurate internal model that can be relied on across messaging, integrations and reporting
  • Handle edge cases such as fragmented trip data, unstructured remarks and inconsistent identifiers
  • Improve onboarding workflows so new customer data and integrations can be activated more efficiently
• Event Layer & Orchestration
  • Build and maintain the event layer that powers automation, traveller engagement and reporting
  • Design orchestration logic for journeys that may move across email, SMS, WhatsApp, Slack and Teams
  • Ensure events, state and outcomes remain consistent across channels and systems
  • Capture interaction and conversation state so traveller journeys remain coherent and continuous
• Conversational & Workflow Systems
  • Help design and maintain structured, deterministic flows for booking and interaction such as hotels, taxis and parking
  • Integrate these flows with third‑party APIs and real‑time data
  • Support the layering of conversational AI on top of these workflows so they remain reliable and controllable at scale
  • Ensure systems are resilient to edge cases and behave predictably in production
  • Build and maintain integrations with travel suppliers and client systems
  • Ensure relevant events and outcomes can be synced back into TMC or corporate systems where required
  • Help create a more repeatable and scalable integration approach over time
• Reporting & Platform Reliability
  • Support the data models and infrastructure that power Grapevine’s reporting and analytics products
  • Improve observability, maintainability and operational resilience across the platform
  • Help evolve strong existing foundations into a clean, scalable long‑term system

What We’re Looking For

• Experience
  • Likely 5+ years in backend, data or platform engineering roles
  • Experience working with messy external data, integrations, or event‑driven systems
  • Comfortable owning systems end to end rather than just delivering tasks
• Technical Skills
  • Strong engineering ability in Java and/or Python
  • Strong SQL skills and comfort working directly with production data
  • Experience building APIs and integration‑heavy systems
  • Familiarity with event‑driven systems, analytics platforms, or customer data platforms
  • Experience with ClickHouse or similar event‑driven analytics systems is beneficial but not required
  • Comfortable working across multiple technologies and tools
• Mindset & Ways of Working
  • Curious and exploratory, with a willingness to experiment using modern tooling including AI‑assisted development
  • Strong systems thinker, particularly where data, logic and user experience intersect
  • Strong attention to data quality and integrity, with an instinct to question, validate and improve how data is captured, structured and used across the platform
  • Comfortable working across data, backend logic and orchestration layers
  • Able to work autonomously and take ownership of key areas of the platform
  • Clear communicator who helps simplify and document systems as they evolve

What Success Looks Like

• New customers can be onboarded faster and more reliably
• Travel data and content is (verifiably) clean, complete and easy to reason about
• Messaging and conversational flows behave consistently and with measured reliability across channels
• Supplier and client integrations become more repeatable and less fragile
• Reporting becomes more reliable, dynamic and commercially valuable
• Dependency on any single individual for platform understanding is significantly reduced

Why This Role Matters

This is a high‑leverage role at the centre of the Grapevine platform. You will be helping shape the system that connects live travel data, traveller engagement, ancillary conversion, client integrations and reporting. The platform already has strong foundations. This role is about taking ownership of that foundation, strengthening it, and helping it scale as Grapevine grows.