We are building foundational infrastructure for a new category. We're looking for exceptional people who want to define it with us.
Reservoir is not a typical software company. We are building the neutral intelligence layer for one of the largest industries in the world. That requires a team that thinks in systems, builds from first principles, and operates with the discipline of a company that knows its foundation will be depended upon by others.
We are intentionally lean. We hire by leverage, not headcount, and scale through technology, integrations, and standards. Every person on this team has an outsized impact on the architecture, the culture, and the trajectory of the company.
If you are drawn to hard problems, long-term platform design, and the opportunity to define a new category of infrastructure, we'd love to hear from you.
We build the layer other systems depend on. Every decision is made with that weight in mind.
Privacy is not a feature we bolt on. It is a structural constraint that shapes every system we design.
At this stage, everyone builds. Leadership means setting direction and shipping — not scheduling meetings about shipping.
We optimize for decisions that compound. Architecture that scales. Intelligence that deepens. A foundation that holds.
We are looking for a foundational technical leader to architect a cleanroom-enabled intelligence infrastructure for hospitality from first principles. You will own the technical architecture end-to-end — from the first production systems through long-term platform evolution. This is not a role for someone who wants to manage. This is a role for someone who wants to build.
View Full RoleReservoir is a cleanroom-enabled intelligence infrastructure purpose-built for hospitality. We are driven by a single non-negotiable belief: Hotels should never have to give up control of their data — or re-build their tech stacks — to understand their guests and deliver meaningful personalization at scale.
Every prior attempt to solve personalization in hospitality has failed because it required centralizing data. Reservoir works because it removes that requirement entirely.
We flip the model: Resolve identity inside the hotel-controlled environment. Raw PII is stripped and tokenized at the boundary. Guest behavior is translated into privacy-safe, predictive, and actionable intelligence — traits, preferences, propensities, and intent. That intelligence is then returned directly to the systems hotels already use, where personalization can be activated automatically. No new UI. No new workflows. The systems hotels already use just get meaningfully smarter.
Our mission: Build the neutral intelligence infrastructure that powers the future of connected hospitality. We are infrastructure, not software. A standard, not a feature. A reservoir, not another data lake.
This is an infrastructure opportunity, not a feature bet.
Personalization has been the number-one priority of every hotel, brand, and hospitality tech partner for years and over the last 5-years, the industry responded by deploying countless specialized systems – PMS, POS, loyalty, messaging, pricing, F&B, activities – each designed to capture data and execute on personalization signals.
The problem is: This explosion of software created significantly more data, but not better intelligence. Each system was designed to execute in isolation, not to work together, so guest data is fragmented across platforms that work perfectly on their own, but don't speak the same language. Hotels are left with massive data lakes – full of information, but with almost no usable insight.
This isn't an execution failure. It's an architectural limitation. The most advanced hospitality platforms in the world are doing their jobs correctly – but they are still fundamentally limited by the architecture of the ecosystem – and operators know it.
The missing piece isn't more software – it's a neutral intelligence infrastructure designed to connect and interpret the behavior these existing systems are already capturing. Without that foundational architecture, guest understanding will always reset to zero, no matter how much software they buy.
Reservoir solves this by introducing a new layer entirely: a shared intelligence substrate that powers the entire hospitality ecosystem, rather than competing against it.
You will own the technical architecture end-to-end — from first principles through long-term platform evolution. In the early months, that means you will be both the architect and the builder: designing systems and writing production code to ship an MVP to live hospitality partners. As we grow, you'll hire and lead the engineering team that scales the platform.
This is not a greenfield problem with clean inputs. Here is what makes the technical work hard:
You'll need to integrate with a significant number of operational vendors — each with different APIs, data models, authentication schemes, and export capabilities. Building a normalization layer that absorbs this chaos cleanly is a core challenge.
Hotels have no consistent way to recognize a returning guest across systems or properties. The same person may exist as five different records across five different platforms at a single property. Building trip-level identity resolution that works across fragmentation — without centralizing PII — is the foundational technical problem.
Hotels operate globally. GDPR, CCPA, and regional data requirements apply, and they apply differently depending on where the guest is, where the hotel is, and where the data is processed. Privacy can't be bolted on — it has to be structural.
Event data from hotel systems is messy — inconsistent field names, missing values, different timestamp formats, duplicated records, and wildly varying levels of granularity across vendors. The intelligence engine is only as good as the normalization layer beneath it.
Hotels need intelligence that can influence a guest's experience during their stay — not after they've checked out. The system has to resolve identity, generate insights, and deliver activation signals fast enough to be useful in operational time.
This is a foundational leadership role. You will shape the core architecture of Reservoir — from the first production systems through long-term platform evolution.
In practice, that means you'll be hands-on for the first 6-12 months: writing code, making infrastructure decisions in real time, and shipping the first version of the platform to live partners. As we scale, you'll shift toward hiring and leading an engineering team, setting technical standards, and driving the long-term architecture. Both phases matter equally.
You will:
While the core principles are fixed — privacy-first architecture, hotel-controlled data, intelligence over execution — the technical design is intentionally open. The right CTO will help determine how this system is built, not just what is built.
Reservoir is being built as foundational infrastructure. The right technical leader will be energized by hard systems problems and the opportunity to design a platform from first principles.
The strongest candidates will likely have experience in areas such as:
Hospitality experience is not required. Systems thinking is. This role is best suited for someone who enjoys designing systems that don't just solve problems — but fundamentally redefine how an entire ecosystem operates.
My name is Matthew Kestenbaum and I am the founder of Reservoir.
I've spent my career building systems that turn human behavior into revenue at scale.
In my first decade, I helped scale Thrillist into the #1 travel & experience publisher in the world and Group Nine Media into a global media powerhouse reaching/engaging hundreds of millions of people every day with our content. After that, I founded Zero Moment Media – a data driven revenue optimization platform and marketing technology stack – which I bootstrapped to $13.24M on an 80% margin in under 24-months, before exiting in June 2022. Since then, I've worked with leadership teams across industries helping design infrastructure that converts fragmented behavioral data into actionable insights that drive meaningful business outcomes.
Reservoir is the culmination of that work. It addresses a pain point that I have personally heard from leaders across the hotel ecosystem. It is a problem that I am uniquely positioned to solve because I have spent my career solving versions of it. And, it is a company I know how to build because I have built and sold it before.
My personal history aside, you should know: Reservoir is not being built alone. We are surrounded by an ecosystem of highly engaged advisors, investors, and industry parters, that have been helping shape this vision from the earliest stages. Their belief in, and support of, our mission has allowed us to validate early, raise capital efficiently, and sign global partners – all before a single line of code has been written.
The CTO joining Reservoir will not just be joining a company – they will be joining a coalition of operators, technologists, and industry leaders working together to build a solution that changes an industry.
As founder, I bring deep domain expertise and enough operational experience to know that my role as Chief Executive is to focus 100% of my attention on delivering capital, aligning opportunities, and removing obstacles so that my technical team can do what they do best: deliver.
As CTO, you will own the technical architecture, engineering execution, and product infrastructure. While product direction will be a shared conversation, you will have full autonomy over technical decisions, hiring, and architecture. You will also have a founder who understands the problem deeply enough to be a useful thought partner – without overriding your technical judgement. A true counterpart from day one.
If successful, Reservoir becomes the neutral intelligence layer that connects guest behavior across systems, properties, and time — allowing the industry to compound customer learning for the first time. The CTO who helps build it will not just be scaling a product. They will be architecting the technical foundation for a new category of infrastructure inside one of the largest industries in the world.
This role offers a chance to design systems that will become the intelligence backbone for hospitality. The right CTO won't just help build the system. They will define the standard.
If the idea of building foundational intelligence infrastructure for an entire industry excites you — we should talk. This role isn't about filling a position. It's about finding the right technical leader to architect something consequential from the ground up.
If you're the kind of builder who gets energized by hard systems problems, long-term platform design, and the opportunity to define a new category of infrastructure, i'd love to connect.
Matthew Kestenbaum || Founder; Reservoir || MK@ReservoirCo.io
If you're the kind of builder who gets energized by hard systems problems and the opportunity to define a new category of infrastructure — we should talk.
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