Data Engineering Manager - Data & Machine Learning Platform

At Booking.com, we want to empower everyone to experience the world. Through our products, partners, and people is how we do it. There's a whole planet of possibilities out there, and we bring it all together, in one place. Booking.com (USA), Inc, one of the support companies in the United States, is seeking a full time Data Engineering Manager. 

Our department mission is to radically accelerate innovation across all data, analytics & Machine Learning teams by providing a self-service, end-to-end platform, enabling the creation of connected, and repeatable, machine learning and analytics solutions. In the team you would join, we envision and set product direction for Data Analytics and investments powering the world’s largest online accommodation reservations website.

Your charter is to build Booking’s innovative Analytical Platform for a wide range of use cases including sophisticated reporting, ML pipelines and data warehousing. Our customers are the Data Scientists, ML and Data Engineers, and Analyst community of Booking. The platform scales to millions of bookings a day, demonstrating several petabytes of data to optimise the end-user experience. In short, you would play a critical role on the team building the Analytics experience that solves Booking’s hardest data consumption challenges. 

You will join the Workflow Management Developer Experience team in Big Data scope to support Migration from Hadoop / Oozie (Spark, Perl, etc) legacy setup to a modern platform (AWS / S3 / Snowflake / Airflow). The Workflow Management Developer Experience (WFME) team is an addition to the existing Workflow Management (WFM) to support the customer with new functionality and processes built on top of the platform. Existing team is building the platform capability, while the WFME team will be responsible for supporting customers with migration from the legacy scope, building processes, new operators and integrations required to make WFM service truly customer centric.

What You Will Be Doing:

We’re looking for an experienced Tech and People Leader to join the Workflow Management Developer Experience team. The candidate should be able to quickly build an e2e view of the legacy and modern tech stacks. Having prior experience in Hadoop / Oozie and AWS / Airflow is a must.

To support the migration we need to analyze the existing workflows and build tools for their migration. This involved reading code to understand nuances and translate them into technical requirements and implementations for the new platform, with a strong focus on Migration Tooling and building operators. The scope is huge, around 4000 workflows. The ideal candidate should have some good examples where they would address a similar problem in the past and enjoy using the “Divide and Conquer” principle while doing this kind of work. They should be able to articulate their thinking to a wide range of collaborators such as Product, Engineering management, team members and users.

• Lead people’s performance and wellbeing
• Help setting up quarterly and yearly objectives, estimate work, lead team and personal performance
• Mentor and coach team members
• Improve team routines and processes for better performance based on the state of the team and the service. Make sure the team follows the standard processes, learn and embrace
• Handle hiring and compensations
• Help the team to communicate externally and internally, resolve conflicts
• Own end-to-end data and data applications by defining, monitoring and adjusting relevant SLIs and SLOs
• Handle, mitigate and learn from incidents in a manner that improves the overall system health
• Continuously evolve your craft by keeping up to date with the latest developments in data engineering and related technologies, introducing them to the community and promoting their application in areas where they can generate impact
• Actively chip in to Data Engineering at Booking.com through training, exploration of new technologies, interviewing, onboarding and mentoring colleagues
• Push for improvements, scaling and extending data engineering tooling and infrastructure, collaborating with central teams

You are a role model of the Booking.com values:

• Thrive with change and gets things done
• Demand a high standard of excellence in their craft
• Accept the opportunity to improve
• Understand success starts with accountability and ownership
• Care more about being successful and reaching goals together than individually
• Curious, experiments and continuously learns
• Humble, open, friendly and remember that diversity gives us strength

Technology, Craft & Delivery

• Take leadership in driving tactical and strategic technical decisions in order to fill gaps in the modern Workflow Management solution and migrate from the legacy stack
• Develop vital operators and integrations
• Maintain and share the E2E vision on the scope of the service and migration
• Analysing oozie jobs, finding in scheduling and compute usage
• Proactively chip in to the migration strategy
• Drive requirements for the migration tooling
• Implement user friendly Tooling to support oozie migration to Airflow taking into account the nuances of the legacy structures and the modern tech stack
• Train and support users with the migration stack:
• AWS / Airflow / Snowflake
• K8S
• Hadoop / Hive / Spark / Java / Python / Scala
• SQL
• Terraform
• APIs

Architecture & Product Strategy 

• Define, shape and deliver the roadmap
• Build new products, processes and operational plans
• Negotiate on the strategic importance of own product roadmap features
• Drive innovation in the team
• Lead the architecture across the team

What You Will Bring: 

• 6+ years of experience in Data Engineering
• At least 3 years of experience leading and developing a team of engineers in a fast-paced and sophisticated environment
• SRE experience is a plus
• Working in Developer Experience team is a plus
• Experience working with Kubernetes
• Experience deploying data processing solutions on cloud providers is a plus
• Experience with big data tools (eg Spark) and ML frameworks (eg TensorFlow) commonly used for ML is a plus
• Experience working with workflow management tools such as Apache Airflow is a plus
• Ability to lead multiple teams is a plus
• A deep understanding of software development in a team, and a track record of developing and shipping software
• Strong technical skills (Coding & System design) with ability to get hands-on with your team if needed
• Excellent communicator with strong collaborator management experience, good commercial awareness and technical vision
• You have driven successful technical, business and people related initiatives that improved productivity, performance and quality
• You are a humble and thoughtful technology leader, you lead by example and gain your teammates’ respect through actions, not the title
• Analytical skills and data-driven mentality
• You are required to live within a commutable distance from your assigned office location

What We'll Provide:

Booking.com’s Total Rewards Philosophy is not only about compensation but also about benefits. Our Total Rewards are aimed to make it easier for you to experience all that life has to offer on your terms, so you can focus on what really matters. We offer competitive compensation as well as thoughtful, valuable, and even fun benefits which include:

• Medical, life, and disability insurance*
• Annual paid time off and generous paid leave scheme including: parent, grandparent, bereavement, sick and care leave
• Industry leading product discounts for yourself, friends, and family, including automatic Genius Level 3 status and quarterly Booking.com wallet credit 
• Free access to online learning platforms,  mentorship programs, and a complimentary Headspace membership
• Collaborative, friendly and diverse culture 
• Referral Program
• For this role will have a salary range of: $210,000- $231,000
• Additional Annual or Quarterly bonus potential (role dependent)
• *Please note that while our philosophy is the same in every location, benefits may differ by office/country.  

Should you require accommodation to meet the essential functions of this job, please let us know.