Inventory Operations Manager Jobs in Illinois (NOW HIRING)

About Us
Perk (formerly TravelPerk) is the intelligent platform for travel and spend management. Built to tackle the time-consuming, manual work that gets in the way of real work, our tools automate everything from travel bookings to expenses, invoice processing, and more. By eliminating this shadow work that wastes hours, erodes morale, and saps innovation, we're on a mission to power real work, with real impact.
We're trusted by more than 10,000 companies worldwide, including Wise, On Running, Breitling, and Fabletics, and we're tackling the 7 hours of lost productivity per employee each week, a $1.7 trillion problem.
Founded in 2015, Perk has grown into a global company of more than 1,800 people across 12 offices globally, with headquarters in London and Boston. We combine innovation, control, and simplicity to transform how businesses work and how people feel at work.
At Perk, we're driven by our values, like being an owner, delivering a 7-star experience, and working as one team. We value curiosity, purpose, and mindset, not just knowledge, to unlock the power in your potential. Our talent team brings together leading minds from the travel and SaaS industries, representing over 70 countries. If you're excited about having a real impact and shaping how millions of people experience work, we'd love you on the team.
Visit www.perk.com to learn more.
At Perk, our Inventory Operations team ensures the travel and spend content powering our platform is accurate, reliable, and high-quality. We're hiring a Senior Inventory Operations Specialist to raise the bar on how we operate, building the systems, standards, and frameworks that sustain quality and scalability across the domain. Flights are the highest-stakes inventory type we manage: schedule changes, fare rules, and GDS/NDC supplier feeds all have to reconcile in real time, with zero tolerance for stale or wrong data reaching a booking. This is a senior IC role, not a management track.
You'll balance short- and long-term priorities, use data as a strategic asset, and influence product and tooling decisions. You won't just deliver your own work; you'll shape how the team operates, coach others, and drive cross-functional initiatives with lasting impact on inventory performance and reliability. The challenge: you'll be setting standards for teams you don't manage, so your influence has to come from being right, not from authority. Based in our Barcelona office three days a week, you'll report to our Director of Operations, alongside 8 other Inventory Ops specialists.
What You'll Do
• Set the Standard: Define operational standards that reduce BAU workload and increase reliability
across teams and markets. Lead retrospectives and drive scalable process refinements.
• Think and Act Strategically: Balance domain and company goals, making trade-offs with business
impact in mind. Set ambitious OKRs and recognise when diminishing returns mean it's time to
redirect focus.
• Turn Data into Direction: Formulate analytical questions that reveal root causes and trends.
Synthesise complex insights into clear recommendations, and guide teammates in interpreting
data accurately.
• Shape the Inventory Domain: Anticipate how airline schedule changes, fare filings, or supplier feed
updates affect performance. Influence product and tooling decisions, define technical standards,
and build governance frameworks that scale across markets.
• Own the Reporting Cadence: Drive automation, monitoring, and workflow improvements that
span multiple teams. Own the cadence that ties inventory reliability (uptime, content accuracy
rate) directly to revenue impact for senior stakeholders.
• Own the AI Loop: Build and evaluate AI-assisted workflows for supplier-content triage and
anomaly detection, define what "good" looks like, set guardrails for auto-actioned changes, and
make the build-vs-buy call on tooling.
What You'll Need
• Operational Depth: You've owned a flights or airline-inventory workflow end to end, schedules,
fares, or GDS/NDC content, not just executed steps someone else designed, and can point to
where you expanded its scope.
• Domain Mastery: Expert technical knowledge of airline inventory, schedules, fares, availability,
GDS and NDC content flows, plus the APIs and booking infrastructure that surface it. You can
anticipate how an airline schedule change or fare filing ripples through the ecosystem.
• Strategic Thinking: You connect operational work to business outcomes and make trade-offs
confidently. You see the big picture without losing sight of execution quality.
• Coaching Ability: Experience mentoring others, even without formal management responsibility.
You raise the bar for those around you.
• Process Design Expertise: Proven ability to design frameworks and governance models that scale,
Compensation:
Compensation for this role is a combination of salary and stock options. The anticipated base salary range is $106,00 - $134,500 per year. Actual compensation may vary based on specific qualifications, experience, and other job-related factors.
How We Work
At Perk, we take an IRL-first approach to work, where our team works together in-person 3 days a week. As such, this role requires you to be based within commuting distance of our hubs. We fundamentally believe in the value of meeting in real life to improve connectivity, productivity, creativity and ultimately making us a great place to work.
For certain roles, we can help with relocation from anywhere in the world, English is the official language at the office. Please submit your resume in English if you choose to apply. Do not forget to submit an updated portfolio and/or resume.
Perk is a global company with a diverse customer base, and we want to make sure the people behind our product reflect that. We're an equal opportunity employer, which means you're welcome at Perk regardless of how you look, where you're from, or anything else that makes you, well, you.
Protect Yourself from Recruitment Scams
All official communication from Perk will always come from email addresses ending in @perk.com or @externalperk.com, our verified social media channels, or recruiters listed on our official LinkedIn page. We will never ask you to pay for equipment, training, or fees, request sensitive personal information such as bank details early in the process, or communicate through unofficial apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal. If you receive a message claiming to be from Perk that seems suspicious, please do not respond. Forward it to security [at] perk .com, and we will confirm whether it is legitimate.
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