Senior Partnership Operations Automation Engineer (For contingent workers)

Context

Booking.com's Flights division operates a strategic partnership with Etraveli Group (The Partner). The two companies collaborate daily across several workstreams.

The partnership is managed by a Strategic Partnership Management Office (SPMO) team that coordinates across 40+ joint Slack channels, quarterly dependency planning cycles with 350-400 entries, monthly SteerCo reports at SVP/CEO level, and ongoing operational escalations spanning technical, commercial, content, financial, and customer service domains.

As the Strategic partnership scales, we have identified a set of concrete deliverables to improve partnership operations — including a shared KPI dashboard, cross-company action tracking, refreshed engagement tooling, and better data-driven reporting. The SPMO team is fully consumed by day-to-day partnership management and does not have in-house technical/automation skills to deliver on these commitments therefore we are looking for someone to support the team by building the operational tooling and automation layer that enables the partnership team to scale.

What You'll Deliver

Phase 0 — Discovery & Process Audit (Weeks 1-2)

• Before building anything, the contractor must sit with the SPMO team and observe how the partnership is actually managed day-to-day.

  
  

• Shadow the team: Attend partnership meetings, observe how escalations flow through Slack channels, watch how SteerCo reports are assembled, see how the dependency tracker is maintained, understand how actions are tracked today

  
  

• Map current workflows: Document the missing processes (most are already documented) where information lives, how it moves, what the bottlenecks are, where manual effort is highest

  
  

• Stakeholder interviews: Short sessions with stakeholders to understand pain points from each perspective

  
  

• Audit existing tooling: Review current Google Sheets, Slack channel structure, existing dashboards, and any automation already in place

  
  

• Produce a discovery report: A short document summarising findings, confirming or adjusting the proposed deliverables, and presenting a detailed execution plan for the remaining weeks, reviewed and approved by the hiring manager before moving to implementation

Phase 1 — Foundation (Weeks 2-5)

1. Jira Project Setup & Cross-Instance Integration

• Design and configure a Jira project structure for The Partner-Bcom partnership management (action tracking, escalations, dependency management)

  
  

• Set up workflows, custom fields, dashboards, and automation rules tailored to cross-company collaboration

  
  

• Implement cross-instance linking between Booking.com's Jira and Etraveli's Jira instance enabling shared visibility on priority workstreams (technical escalations, search/cache, content issues) while maintaining clear internal-only vs. shared boundaries

  
  

• Migrate existing action tracking from Google Sheets to Jira with automated deadline flagging and status notifications

  
  

• Create role-based views: partnership team operational view, leadership/SteerCo strategic view, workstream-specific views

2. Shared KPI / Metrics Dashboard

• Build an sharable dashboard with key partnership KPIs (delivery reliability, escalation volume/resolution, SLA compliance, dependency tracking metrics)

  
  

• Pull data from existing sources (Google Sheets trackers, Slack channels, Jira, pdf reports)

  
  

• Design for both internal and partner-facing versions with appropriate data boundaries

Phase 2 — Intelligence Layer MVP (Weeks 5-10)

3. Escalation Analytics & Cross-Channel Monitoring (MVP)

• Build a monitoring system across 40+ joint The Partner-Bcom Slack channels that detects issues, classifies by type (technical / commercial / CS / content / financial) and severity

  
  

• Implement keyword and pattern detection for signals that indicate problems not yet formally escalated (outages, impact mentions, spike discussions, blocking issues)

  
  

• Monitored channels, keywords, and severity thresholds must be configurable via a Google Sheet the team can edit without touching code

  
  

• Use LLM APIs via Booking.com GenAI Gateway (Claude / Gemini) for classification and summarisation — not custom ML model training.

  
  

• MVP scope: monitoring + alerting + weekly summary.

4. SteerCo Report Assembly Automation (MVP)

• Build a report assembly workflow that pre-populates SteerCo and QBR templates from dashboards, trackers, and Slack channel monitoring

  
  

• Auto-collect highlights and lowlights from partnership channels since the last report

  
  

• Generate a "what's missing / who hasn't contributed" checklist

  
  

• Template structure and data sources configurable via Google Sheets so the team can adapt to changing report formats

  
  

• MVP scope: template pre-population + highlights collection. Narrative drafting and sensitivity screening deferred.

Phase 3: Documentation & Handover (week 11-13)

• Task-oriented team guides: step-by-step instructions for every change the team is likely to make (add a Slack channel, add a KPI, modify a Jira workflow, change an alert threshold, update a report template)

  
  

• CLAUDE.md project file in every code repository — documenting codebase structure, key files, dependencies, and common modification patterns so the team can use Claude Code to maintain and extend the code

  
  

• Configuration reference: where every tuneable setting lives and what it controls

  
  

• Architecture overview for any future developer engagement

  
  

• Knowledge transfer sessions with the SPMO team

  
  

• Recommendation document for evolution roadmap: what the MVPs could grow into, with effort estimates

  
  

• Design Principle: Built for AI-Assisted Maintenance

  
  

• The SPMO team (partnership managers, not engineers) must be able to evolve, tune, and extend all deliverables after the contractor engagement ends. The team has access to Claude Code, Gemini, and NotebookLM — meaning they can use AI to read, modify, and extend well-structured code, but they won't write code from scratch. This shapes every architectural choice:

  
  

• Booking.com tech stack: Build on the tools the team already has - Jira (project management + automation rules), Confluence (documentation + knowledge base), Google Workspace (Sheets, Docs, Slides, Calendar), Slack, and LLM APIs via Booking.com GenAI Gateway (provides access to Claude and Gemini). No external platforms the team does not have access to. All LLM calls must go through the GenAI Gateway — direct API calls to Anthropic or Google are not permitted.

  
  

• No-code/low-code where possible and Reserve custom code for where platform capabilities genuinely don't reach

  
  

• Configuration over code: Where custom code is needed, build a clear configuration layer (a Google Sheet or Confluence page that controls which channels are monitored, what keywords trigger alerts, severity thresholds, report templates, and data sources) so the team can easily edit the configs.

  
  

• Claude Code-friendly codebase: All custom code must be clean, well-structured, and thoroughly commented so the team can use Claude Code to understand, modify, and extend it. Include a CLAUDE.md project file documenting the codebase structure, key files, and common modification patterns.

  
  

• Documentation in Confluence: All handover documentation, runbooks, and architecture docs live in Confluence (not scattered Google Docs). Task-oriented guides: "how to add a new Slack channel to monitoring", "how to add a KPI to the dashboard", "how to change an escalation threshold".

Required Skills & Experience

Must Have

• Process Discovery and Business Analysis — Ability to observe how a team works, map existing workflows, identify bottlenecks, and translate findings into an automation plan.

  
  

• Jira and Confluence Administration — Project setup, workflow design, custom fields, dashboards, automation rules in Jira. Confluence for documentation and knowledge management. Experience configuring Jira for cross-company or partner collaboration scenarios (shared visibility with access boundaries) strongly preferred.

  
  

• Slack API Development — Bot development, channel monitoring, message parsing, automated notifications. This is the backbone of the escalation monitoring system.

  
  

• Google Workspace Integration — Google Sheets, Docs, Slides, Calendar APIs and/or Google Apps Script. Most existing data lives in Google Workspace and the team will continue using it alongside Jira.

  
  

• Python or JavaScript/TypeScript — Solid scripting and integration development. Code must be clean, modular, and well-documented — the team will use Claude Code (AI coding assistant) to maintain and extend it after the engagement.

  
  

• LLM/GenAI Application Development — Practical experience building applications on top of large language model APIs (Claude, Gemini, or similar) for classification, summarisation, and content extraction. Applied AI engineering — not research or model training.

Nice to Have

• Cross-instance Jira integration — Familiarity with Atlassian marketplace apps for Jira-to-Jira linking (e.g., Backbone Issue Sync, Exalate, Getint). If not already experienced, must be able to evaluate and implement during Phase 1.

  
  

• Dashboard and reporting tools — Experience building operational dashboards in Google Sheets, Looker Studio, or similar. Strong candidates may propose better approaches discovered during Phase 0.

  
  

• Prompt engineering — Familiarity with patterns for reliable LLM-based classification and extraction (Anthropic Claude API and/or Google Gemini API

  
  

• Slack Bolt framework or similar Slack app development frameworks

  
  

• Data migration — Experience moving operational data from spreadsheets to structured systems (Google Sheets to Jira) while preserving history and relationships

  
  

• Experience with AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) — understanding how to write code that non-engineers can maintain with AI assistance

  
  

• Strategic partnership, alliance management, or business operations context — helpful for understanding the team work during discovery but not required

  
  

• Experience in large-platform environments (Booking.com scale or similar) — useful but not essential for this scope

Profile

• Seniority: Senior (5+ years of relevant experience in business automation, ops tooling, or technical consulting)

  
  

• Working style: Autonomous, structured, comfortable operating in ambiguity. This is a solo contributor role embedded in a non-technical team — you need to translate business requirements into technical solutions independently, communicate progress clearly, and manage your own priorities within the agreed framework.

  
  

• Stakeholder management: You will work primarily with the Booking.com partnership team (Director + 2-3 partnership managers) and will have some interaction with The Partner counterparts for the Jira integration and shared tooling. Comfort working in a cross-company environment is important.

The payrate for independent contractors is 40-95 EUR/hr.