Travel Unit Services Operations Lead

Travel Unit Services Operations Lead (Budget & Resource)

The Travel Unit Services Operations Lead (Budget & Resource) is responsible for strengthening how Travel Unit Professional Services Engineering plans, monitors and steers its budget, capacity and resource needs. The role serves as a cross-functional operations lead for Services Engineering, ensuring financial indicators, demand trends, capacity planning and workforce requirements are connected through a reliable operating framework. By bringing structure, transparency and coordination to complex topics across multiple organizations, the role enables informed decision-making, effective prioritization and predictable delivery capacity. The position will operationalize and continuously improve the Services resource and budget management model across Travel Unit, with a particular focus on the AIR-SEE organization and its interfaces with other Travel Unit organizations. The role leads the Travel Unit Services capacity management program, supports budget and resource governance, acts as a key Engineering interface with Business Operations Planning (BOP), and coordinates the end-to-end lifecycle of resource and recruitment requests.

Key Responsibilities

Capacity Planning and Resource Management

• Lead the Travel Unit Services capacity management program, aligning budget, workforce capacity, skills, recruitment plans and demand forecasts through the R.A.D.A.R. (Resource Allocation, Demand and Recruitment) framework.
• Develop and maintain an operating model that connects budget allocation, Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) capacity, workforce footprint and recruitment activities with portfolio priorities and anticipated demand.
• Coordinate resource planning, hiring needs, workload visibility and capacity monitoring across Services Engineering and relevant stakeholder groups.
• Establish reporting, governance routines and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that provide visibility into capacity, recruitment progress, workload and demand gaps.
• Drive continuous improvements to workforce planning processes, data quality, reporting and decision-making practices.

Budget Management and Financial Steering

• Manage assigned transversal budget lines, ensuring accurate planning, forecasting, monitoring and reporting.
• Support budget owners by facilitating collaboration across Engineering, Finance, Business Operations Planning (BOP) and business stakeholders.
• Consolidate budget inputs, identify risks and variances, and recommend corrective actions to support financial objectives.
• Prepare business cases and arbitration requests with clear rationale, quantified impacts and decision options.

Stakeholder Coordination and Governance

• Partner with Engineering, Finance, People & Culture (P&C), Lean Portfolio Management (LPM), delivery teams and business stakeholders to align priorities, governance and decision-making.
• Act as the primary Engineering contact for budget and resource topics with Business Operations Planning (BOP).
• Translate Engineering priorities and constraints into operational and financial insights to support planning and arbitration discussions.
• Facilitate governance forums, escalation paths and recurring reviews to ensure timely visibility and resolution of capacity or budget challenges.
• Foster alignment, transparency and shared understanding across stakeholders by making assumptions, dependencies and risks visible.

Resource Demand and Recruitment

• Collect, structure and monitor resource and recruitment requests, ensuring clarity of scope, timing, location, funding and approval status.
• Coordinate approval processes with Engineering leadership, People & Culture (P&C), Business Operations Planning (BOP) and governance forums.
• Maintain end-to-end visibility of resource requests from demand identification through approval, recruitment and staffing progress.
• Report on recruitment status, pending decisions, bottlenecks, workforce ratios and delivery risks.
• Support proactive workforce planning by identifying opportunities to improve predictability, simplify processes and reduce lead times.

Key Interfaces

• Services Engineering leadership teams.
• Business Operations Planning (BOP), Finance and People & Culture (P&C) stakeholders.
• Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) and delivery organiz