Senior Software Engineer I

Role Description:

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties

As a Senior Software Engineer I, you are responsible for the development, performance, and scaling of internal systems. You will work independently and will also be responsible for making technical decisions within a team.

Important aspects of the job include:

• Rapidly developing next-generation scalable, flexible, and high-performance systems, with end-to-end ownership by monitoring and adjusting SLIs and SLOs.
• Solving issues with internal systems, prioritizing based on customer and business impact
• Acting as an intermediary for problems, with both technical and non-technical audiences
• Testing; we have thousands of experiments running at the same time, interacting with each other.
• Evaluating customer needs and coming up with ideal solutions for it, assessing different languages (Java, etc), architecture and risks.
• Contributing to the growth of Booking.com through interviewing, on-boarding, or other recruitment efforts

Role Qualifications and Requirements

We are looking for driven Software Engineers who enjoy solving problems, who initiate solutions and discussions and who believe that any challenge can be scaled with the right approach and tools.

We have found that people who match the following requirements are the ones who fit us best:

• You have strong programming skills and experience with 2+ server-side programming languages.
• Minimum of 7 years software development experience.
• Having experience with Java, Kubernetes, Kafka, AWS.
• Proven experience with relational databases and non-relational databases.
• Previous experience with distributed systems.
• Experience with AWS cloud native solution.
• Experience of working on products that impact a large customer base is an advantage.
• You own your systems end-to-end and are comfortable performing incident management.
• You are an excellent communicator and you are able to influence and cooperate with people at all levels.
• You take initiative to address the larger technical needs of the product you work on and always keep the customer at the center of everything you do.
• Drive successful technical and business-related initiatives that improve productivity, performance, and quality.
• Possess a ‘can do’ attitude, acting proactively to address technical needs rather than reacting to them.
• Advanced System Architecture: Proven track record of architecting complex, large-scale distributed systems. You define architectural standards and guide teams in designing observable, reliable systems capable of processing high-volume metadata across diverse assets.
• Technical Leadership: Proven experience in owning and leading technical projects, with the ability to partner with non-technical leadership, negotiate complex requirements, and drive alignment on technical solutions.
• Operational Excellence: Demonstrated ability to keep critical systems up and running, with a strong grasp of reliability, troubleshooting, and incident management.
• Business Acumen: Ability to understand the business deeply, grasp and explain complex concepts, and make pragmatic technical decisions.
• It would be great if you have prior experience with mentoring, coaching and training team members.
• Excellent communication; written and spoken