Director, Service Delivery - Strategic Airline Account

Routespring | Remote within India | Full time | Reports to the CEO

About Routespring:

Routespring provides travel management technology and crew travel operations for businesses and airlines. We are a small, founder-led company with teams across India and the United States. Our airline business is growing, and our flagship US airline account is the operating model we intend to use for future airline customers.

Role overview:

Our flagship airline account has expanded faster than the operating model supporting it. We need a senior service-delivery leader who can stabilize the account, improve how work moves across teams, and build an operating model that will scale with the airline.

This is not a caretaker role. Your initial mandate is to understand why commitments slip, why some issues recur after being closed, where reporting fails to answer the customers questions, and where ownership breaks down between teams. You will then change the processes, controls, and operating habits that allow those failures to happen.

You will be accountable for customer trust, delivery risk, operational performance, executive communication, and the quality of every commitment Routespring makes to the account. Running meetings and maintaining trackers is necessary, but success means the underlying operation gets better.

The role has the authority to drive account priorities across operations, support, product, engineering, and finance. It is a hands-on individual-contributor leadership role at the outset, not a portfolio, P&L, or large-team management position. You will personally run reviews, inspect reports, write customer updates, challenge weak answers, and drive issues to closure.

As the account stabilizes and Routespring adds more airlines, the scope can grow into building the service-delivery team and leading airline service delivery across the company.

Key responsibilities:

- Own the stabilization and continuous-improvement plan for the account. Identify recurring failure modes, establish priorities, assign owners, and measure whether corrective actions are working.

- Own overall account health, including customer trust, delivery risk, executive relationships, and early identification of retention risk.

- Run the account operating cadence: weekly operational calls, cross-functional delivery reviews, monthly performance and SLA reviews, and quarterly executive reviews.

- Maintain one reliable view of priorities, commitments, dates, dependencies, risks, and escalations for the customer and Routespring teams.

- Validate commitments before they reach the customer. When a date or scope changes, communicate the impact and recovery plan before the customer has to ask.

- Lead escalations involving booking failures, stranded travelers, refunds and credits, hotel issues, reporting gaps, and repeated incidents. Establish the facts, coordinate the response, communicate clearly, and ensure the root cause is addressed before closure.

- Own the quality of operational and financial reporting, including travel metrics, SLA performance, reconciliation, credits, and exception reporting. Inspect the underlying data, challenge inconsistencies, and convert analysis into actions and decisions.

- Govern rollouts of new workflows and product changes. Confirm that requirements are understood, testing is complete, support is prepared, documentation is ready, and the customer knows what is changing.

- Establish the repeatable service-delivery model for future airline accounts.

What success looks like in the first 90 days:

- The accounts main failure modes are identified, baselined, and assigned corrective actions with owners and dates.

- The customer and internal teams have one reliable view of priorities, commitments, dependencies, and escalations.

- Risks and missed dates are communicated before the customer discovers them.

- Repeated incidents are tracked through root-cause resolution rather than closed as isolated tickets.

- Operational, SLA, and reconciliation reporting is accurate, useful, and delivered on a dependable cadence.

- Internal ownership is clear, and fewer issues depend on one person manually chasing every team.

- A documented operating model exists that can be reused for the next airline account.

Required experience and capabilities:

- 10-15 years of relevant experience, including recent, direct ownership of a complex US enterprise account or operational program. We care more about the depth of your personal ownership than your current title, team size, or company size.

- Evidence that you have personally stabilized or materially improved a difficult customer account, service operation, or delivery program.

- Experience handling service failures, missed commitments, conflicting priorities, and executive escalations directly with enterprise customers.

- Strong enterprise-client judgment. You communicate risk early, manage expectations without overpromising, push back professionally, and distinguish a serious operational risk from routine noise.

- Cross-functional leadership across operations, support, product, engineering, finance, or implementation teams. You can drive decisions and closure even when the people involved do not report to you.

- Operational judgment. You verify that the customers problem was actually solved and is unlikely to recur rather than relying on a completed task or closed ticket.

- Analytical ability. You can inspect operational and financial reports, identify inconsistencies and outliers, and ask the question the customer is likely to ask next.

- Clear, concise written and verbal communication. You can produce useful minutes, executive updates, escalation summaries, decision records, and recovery plans without relying on a PMO or communications team.

- Experience succeeding in a startup, small company, or similarly lean environment where responsibilities are not neatly divided and mature processes do not already exist.

- Comfort working directly with founders, making progress with limited layers and specialized support, and building the structure needed to make the operation work.

- Bachelors degree or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred experience:

- Airline operations, crew travel, travel management, SaaS delivery, or another operationally critical service environment.

- Direct experience with US-based enterprise customers and distributed IndiaUS teams.

- Experience building a service-delivery function, playbook, or operating model rather than only administering an established one.

- Familiarity with service-management, project-management, or continuous-improvement methods. Certifications such as ITIL or PMP are useful but are not substitutes for hands-on account ownership.

- Relevant candidates may currently be Senior Service Delivery Managers, Account Delivery Managers, Customer Success and Delivery leaders, Engagement Managers, or Client Partners.

Working model:

- Full-time, remote position based in India.

- Regular overlap with US Eastern business hours is required. Scheduled customer calls may run as late as 11:30 p.m. IST.

- This is not an overnight-shift role. Working hours will be adjusted around the account cadence.

- The role is an individual contributor at the outset, with the opportunity to build a team as the airline business grows.