Lead Software Engineer, Sales & Retail

Finnair is a diverse community of professionals who work ambitiously with a big heart and commitment. A strong safety culture is our priority and at the core of our everyday work, never taking it for granted. We are committed to doing our share in solving the climate challenge by determinedly following our science-based pathway to decarbonize our operations. We find meaning in our purpose: With our heart in Finland, we make every journey better, today and tomorrow. Our values – Always Safe, Customer at Heart and Stronger Together– guide us in everything we do.

As part of the evolution of our Digital organisation, we are strengthening strategy implementation by clarifying structures and leadership to bring more focus, improve prioritisation, and support the business more closely. The new setup strengthens product management and software development practices and provides a clearer foundation for data‑ and AI‑driven development, while enabling clearer roles and new opportunities for professional growth.

Our Digital Engineering team builds and runs Finnair's digital customer experience — one of Finland's largest e-commerce platforms. We're investing in how we build it: strengthening our product and software development practices and building toward more modern, AI-assisted engineering. Finnair Plus is central to how we build lasting relationships with our customers, and getting its technology right matters.

The Sales & Retail tribe is the commercial engine behind every booking, ancillary purchase, and payment on finnair.com and in the app — and getting its technology right is central to Finnair’s growth.

We are now looking for a

LEAD SOFTWARE ENGINEER

to own the cross-cutting technical direction across our Sales & Retail tribe — the technical and architectural questions that span our squads. The role sits within Finnair’s Digital Engineering team and is based at Finnair HQ near Helsinki Airport.

The Sales & Retail tribe builds and runs the commercial retail experience on finnair.com and in the Finnair app: booking flows, ancillary products (seats, bags, meals, upgrades, bundles), pricing, and promotions. The tribe manages complex integrations with airline reservation systems, pricing and availability feeds. These are high-traffic, revenue-critical systems where reliability, security, and conversion directly affect the business.

As Lead Software Engineer, you are the technical lead for the tribe. This is a senior individual-contributor role focused on technical leadership. The squads keep a high degree of autonomy over how they build, while you focus on the broader technical themes and keep the tribe’s engineering practices strong and coherent. You’ll work in close partnership with the Engineering Manager and Product Lead. Part of what makes the role interesting is shaping how the tribe builds software going forward — including where AI-assisted development genuinely helps.

In this role, you’ll:

• Set the technical and architectural direction for the tribe, and shape how it approaches quality, testing, security, and design.
• Own the shared frameworks and tooling used across squads, and keep a pragmatic, ongoing dialogue about which technologies fit our needs.
• Help complex work succeed across squads — running proofs-of-concept and discussing roadmaps with key vendors up front to turn unknowns into knowns, and unblocking the hard decisions that span more than one squad as they come up.
• Share reusable solutions and good practices beyond your own squads, and contribute to technical discussions across the wider engineering organization.
• Explore how AI can change the way the tribe designs, builds, and operates software, and guide its adoption across the squads.
• Stay close to the work: review designs, contribute to complex technical decisions, and get into the code when it matters.

What success could look like:

• In your first months: you’ve got to know the tribe’s systems, people, and the key technical questions, and formed a clear point of view on direction that you’ve shared with peers and stakeholders.
• Within the first year: you’ve helped shape and de-risk several of the tribe’s more significant technical efforts and left clear patterns and approaches behind for the squads to build on.
• Over time: the tribe is visibly stronger technically — better architecture, faster delivery of complex work, and a stronger technical voice beyond its own squads.

To succeed and enjoy this role, we hope you bring:

• Around 7–10+ years in software development, including several years as a technical lead for a team — with a track record of building and running complex, cloud-native, high-load systems on AWS.
• Genuine full-stack capability, comfortable across the web front-end (Angular/TypeScript) and the backend services behind it (Node.js/TypeScript), with experience in distributed systems and microservices.
• Solution architecture and systems/integration design skills, with experience designing and building integrations with external systems and APIs.
• A good grasp of automated testing and building solutions that are testable by design.
• Experience with secure software development and architecture.
• Comfort leading without formal authority: you bring people along through clarity and credibility, and you’re happy to challenge an approach when something doesn’t add up.
• A product mindset — you care how technical decisions affect conversion, customer experience, and the business, not just code quality.
• Strong collaboration and proactivity: you spot problems and opportunities early and move them forward.
• Genuine interest in modern, AI-assisted development.
• Strong written and spoken English, and a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a relevant field (or equivalent experience).

Nice to have:

• Experience in e-commerce, booking, or other transaction-heavy, conversion-sensitive products.
• Experience in an airline, travel, or another integration-heavy, regulated domain.
• Familiarity with payment flows or commerce integrations in a consumer-facing context.
• Strong observability practices in production (structured logging, metrics, error tracking, performance monitoring — e.g. Datadog).

Working at Finnair:

We offer you an exciting opportunity to work in the fast-changing aviation and international travel industry in a culture that drives and enables professional development and continuous improvement. You will be supported by internally highly rated supervisory work with modern leadership practices that we constantly develop. 

We are happy to enable our employees to enrich their lives and fulfill their travel dreams by offering a wide leisure travel benefit. We also support the health and wellbeing of our employees through our own Sickness Fund insurance benefit, Epassi (sport, culture, wellbeing or commuting benefit), gyms around the Finnair campus and activities organized by our hobby clubs.  

We work in a hybrid model with regular on-site presence at our HQ near Helsinki Airport.

Recruitment process:

Our recruitment process is designed to give you the opportunity to get to know both the role and the people you'll be working with, while allowing us to understand your technical expertise, way of thinking and how you collaborate across teams.

The process includes:

• Recruiter intro – an introductory discussion about your background, the role and what you're looking for.
• Hiring Manager interview – a deeper conversation about the team, the role, your experience and how you approach technical leadership.
• Lightweight pre-assignment & technical discussion – a practical assignment followed by a discussion focused on your technical thinking, architectural decisions and problem-solving approach.
• Final interview – a final conversation to answer any remaining questions, get to know each other better, and make sure the role is the right fit for both you and Finnair.

Interested?

Please submit your application with your CV, cover letter and salary expectation no later than Sunday, 16 August 2026. We review applications on a rolling basis and will begin interviewing candidates as applications are received, so we encourage you to apply as soon as possible.

Please note that the recruitment process includes a pre-employment security clearance and a drug test.

If you have any questions about the role, feel free to reach out to us at jobs@finnair.com. Please note that we do not process applications submitted via email.

Our people are key to our success and the foundation that makes Finnair unique. We are committed to creating a safe work environment where all our people can thrive and succeed. We cherish diversity and strive to employ people with different backgrounds and experiences, bringing together multiple views to foster our business success. According to our employee survey, respecting diversity is at a high level in our work community.