Spotlight on Kevin Cui: Maintaining our infrastructure

Every year, travel positively connects and impacts billions of people. It’s part of why Director of Engineering Kevin Cui was so eager to build and maintain the infrastructure that facilitates in-person connection at Spotnana.

Kevin and his team build and support our internal engineering infrastructure, and they optimize the external developer experience for partners integrating with our APIs.

We spoke with Kevin about why he chose to come work at Spotnana, what it’s like to work on his team, and how in-person gatherings have shaped his Spotnana experience.

Why did you choose to come work at Spotnana?

Director of Engineering Kevin Cui

“There were two main reasons: the people and the industry. Spotnana has an exceptionally strong engineering culture with many talented and thoughtful people. I was excited by the opportunity to work alongside intelligent teams to design and deliver innovative solutions at scale.

“I was also drawn to the travel industry itself. Spotnana’s Travel-as-a-Service platform delivers tangible value to travelers and businesses every day. There’s something very fulfilling about knowing that people rely on our platform to fly to conferences, gather for team offsites, attend customer meetings, or return home to their families. That real-world impact made the opportunity especially meaningful to me.”

What is it like to work on your team?

“What I enjoy most about my team is that our work is highly collaborative and has broad impact, since the travel platform capabilities we build are leveraged across many products, teams, and customer integrations throughout the company.

“On the internal side, we own many of the horizontal engineering tools and foundational technologies that enable product teams to move efficiently and reliably. This includes maintaining and evolving shared infrastructure such as caching layers, databases, encryption at rest, cron job frameworks, and other core platform capabilities that are widely used across the organization.

“On the external side, we support customer and partner integrations through Spotnana’s API-first platform and integration frameworks. A key part of our work is helping developers easily and successfully build on top of Spotnana’s infrastructure.

“Our main goal is to provide a seamless, scalable, and reliable developer experience, both for our engineers and for external partners.”

Can you share how in-person gatherings have shaped your Spotnana experience?

“Converge, our global offsite, has been one of the highlights of working at Spotnana. It’s an event unlike anything I experienced at my previous companies.

“Because we work across different teams and locations, Converge creates valuable opportunities for people to genuinely connect with one another in person. By uniting hundreds of Spotters from around the world, it reinforces our company’s core “Stronger Together” value and helps build relationships that facilitate our day-to-day collaboration.

“Converge also helps us reflect on everything we’ve accomplished together: the customer value we’ve unlocked, the challenges we’ve solved, and the overall growth of the company. 

“Perhaps most importantly, it’s meaningful to see the company recognize and appreciate employees for their contributions.”

Fun Facts!

• What’s the best trip you ever took? Bangkok for Converge. My first trip to Southeast Asia!
• What’s your favorite thing to do at the airport? Read books!
• What’s your favorite airplane snack? Miss Vickie’s chips.
• Aisle, middle, or window seat? Aisle.
• What’s your go-to show to watch on a trip? The Lord of the Rings.
• What’s the top destination on your bucket list? Australia.