Center of Excellence lead

At Avolta (SIX: AVOL), our people are at the driving force behind our success. With a team of over 76,000 individuals representing more than 150 nationalities, we are a truly global company driven by passion, innovation, and excellence.

Born from the combination of Dufry and Autogrill, Avolta is redefining the travel experience through the dedication and expertise of our diverse workforce. Across 73 countries and 1,000 locations, our teams bring energy, creativity, and commitment to delivering world-class travel retail and food & beverage experiences.

We operate across multiple channels - including airports, motorways, cruise ships, ports, railways, and more - offering endless opportunities for collaboration and growth. Our people are empowered to make an impact, supported by a culture that values teamwork, development, and innovation.

Sustainability and social responsibility are embedded in our strategy, ensuring we grow in a way that benefits both our employees and the communities we serve.

Are you looking for a dynamic, international career where your contributions truly matter? Join Avolta and be part of a team that’s shaping the future of travel - together.

Avolta is building a centralised Competitive Intelligence capability to track pricing, assortment and promotional activity across up to 1,000 competitor retail and travel-retail outlets globally. The Program Manager is the operational and strategic owner of this initiative within the Bangalore hub. You will define the roadmap, own delivery, manage stakeholder relationships across 75 countries, and lead a team of 6-7 engineers, developers and QA analysts. This is a high-visibility, high-impact role that sits at the intersection of data engineering, product thinking and commercial strategy.

Program Ownership & Roadmap

• Define, maintain and communicate the end-to-end roadmap for the competitive intelligence data collection programme, from Phase 1 (250 competitors) to Phase 2 (1,000 competitors) within 12 months.
• Translate business requirements from the Global Pricing team into clearly scoped engineering work packages, with acceptance criteria, timelines and success metrics.
• Run bi-weekly sprint planning and retrospective cycles; maintain a prioritised backlog in Jira or equivalent.
• Own the programme risk register: identify technical, data quality and compliance risks proactively and drive mitigation plans.
• Report program status, KPIs and blockers to the Global Head of Pricing on a weekly basis.

Team Leadership & Hiring

• Lead day-to-day management of the Bangalore scraping team (Lead Scraping Engineer, Backend Engineers, Scraper Developers, Data Engineer, QA/Ops Analyst).
• Own the full hiring lifecycle for remaining team vacancies: brief recruiters, define assessment criteria, conduct interviews, make hiring decisions.
• Create a high-performance engineering culture: clear expectations, regular 1:1s, performance feedback, career development plans.
• Drive onboarding for all new joiners; ensure documentation standards and knowledge transfer practices are embedded from day one.

Stakeholder Management & Delivery

• Act as the single point of contact between the Bangalore engineering hub and the Global Pricing, Category Management and IT stakeholders.
• Translate commercial priorities (e.g. monitor competitor X in duty-free category Y by date Z) into actionable engineering tickets.
• Manage SLAs for data delivery: freshness, coverage, accuracy and completeness targets agreed with the business.
• Facilitate data access and usage discussions with Legal, Compliance and IT Security; ensure the programme operates within data ethics and web scraping legal guidelines.

Technical Oversight

• You do not need to write production code, but you must be technically credible: able to review architecture proposals, challenge estimates, and make build-vs-buy decisions with the engineering leads.
• Review and approve tool and vendor selections (proxy providers, scraping frameworks, orchestration platforms, cloud infrastructure).
• Own the programme budget (~€170k/yr headcount + tooling/infra): track spend, forecast, flag variances.
• Ensure the programme scales architecturally from 250 to 1,000 sites without linear headcount growth.

You will not be coding daily, but the following understanding is mandatory to be effective in this role:

• Solid conceptual understanding of web scraping pipelines: crawl → extract → transform → store → serve.
• Familiarity with Python-based scraping toolchain: know what BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, Selenium and Playwright do and where each fits.
• Understanding of anti-bot technologies (Cloudflare, Akamai, CAPTCHA systems) and proxy infrastructure at a conceptual level.
• Ability to read and interpret Python code at a high level — not write it, but understand it well enough to review PRs for scope.
• Familiarity with data pipeline orchestration (Airflow or equivalent), cloud storage (S3/GCS), and basic SQL.
• Experience with project management tools: Jira, Confluence, Notion or equivalent.

• 6+ years of total professional experience in a technical role, with at least 3 years in a program/product management capacity owning data engineering or data platform initiatives.
• Demonstrated experience managing cross-functional engineering teams of 5+ people in a delivery context.
• Proven track record of taking a data programme from concept to production at meaningful scale.
• Prior exposure to web data collection, competitive intelligence or market data products is strongly preferred.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or equivalent; MBA is a plus but not required.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication in English — you will present to senior European stakeholders regularly.

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We look forward to connecting with you soon!