Principal Software Engineer - Private Cloud

At Booking.com. We make it easier for everyone to experience the world. And while that world might feel a little farther away right now, we’re busy preparing for when the world is ready to travel once more.

Across our offices worldwide, we continue to innovate. To solve for some of the most sophisticated challenges in travel and technology, and to plan for the exciting developments that lie ahead. With strategic long-term investments into what we believe the future of travel can be, we are opening up new career opportunities that will have a strong impact on our mission.

We are united in the belief that our very human desire to explore the planet’s beauty and discover more about other people and cultures will endure. The world is waiting for us. Together, we will be ready.

Private Cloud

Booking.com is looking for a Principal Software Engineer (SWE) to join the Private Cloud teams in our Core Platforms department at our Amsterdam headquarters.

Our mission at Booking.com is to create transformative, innovative, and personalized travel experiences for millions of customers all across the world. We want customers to have an amazing experience wherever and whenever they choose: mobile, web, and through partners and 3rd parties.

To support the business with a modern and optimized production infrastructure, we are building and continuously operating a portfolio of compute platforms that we call the Private Cloud, and are on a multi-year journey to migrate some of Booking’s key workloads onto it. The Principal SWE will be responsible for the architecture and technical strategy of the platform, as well as advocating software delivery best practices for our engineering teams and engaging our internal customers through the Principals community. This scope includes the following topics:

- Booking Kubernetes Service (BKS) is our containerized, Kubernetes-powered platform that runs both on premise and on AWS, and currently hosts close to 3000 services. As we continue to extend and modernize the platform and drive further adoption, the Principal SWE will be responsible for taking a critical look at the setup of the service and feed the platform’s roadmap with technical, strategic developments and improvements.

- We have a virtualized, OpenStack-powered, on-prem IaaS offering to which we are migrating our legacy, monolithic applications and services that are central to Booking.com’s business. The reliability, security, performance, scalability, user-friendliness, and efficiency of this platform as well as the advocacy of software delivery best practices will be the Principal SWE’s responsibility.

- We have a timer-based function execution platform that we are migrating from our legacy cron setup to a Kubernetes-powered platform. We are also building a new, event-driven FaaS platform on the Private Cloud to enable the relevant use cases. The responsibility of the Principal SWE covers these platforms too and the nature of the responsibility is identical to what it is for our IaaS and PaaS offerings.

Our goal is to ensure that we are building the right platforms for the use cases of our internal customers, that our platforms follow architectural best practices, that all Private Cloud platforms are the best versions of themselves and that they beat our legacy bare metal infrastructure on every key metric like reliability, security, efficient resource usage and convenience for the end user, and that we shrink our bare metal footprint by successfully onboarding many workloads onto the new platform.

The Principal SWE will take a leading role in shaping and realizing this future in collaboration with our Private Cloud teams, application and infra service owners, engineering community and our technical leaders.

What you'll be doing:

• Leads design of a successful highly distributed, large scale platform that has a major impact on the internal and external users
• Serves as a back-end tech lead on large scale projects
• Hands-on development of proof of concepts and evaluation of new technologies
• Implement technical strategic decisions in multi-functional teams
• Works closely with product owners and engineers to design, implement, continually improve highly scalable applications and services
• Provides technical guidance to other team members
• Evangelizes design patterns on the company level
• Maintains a current understanding of industry and technology trends
• Communicates and enforces coding standards

 What you'll bring:

• 10+ years of software development experience, minimum 3 years in lead/architect role
• Experience in having initiated and led digital transformation and technology modernization programs
• Experience and understanding about how to develop and operate strategic systems to ensure scalability and high availability
• Proven hands-on experience in designing, building, improving and operating high-performance, highly-available and scalable distributed systems in fast growing environment
• Expertise with and passion for developer productivity workflow and tools (CI/CD, language stack support, software development lifecycle, testing strategies). Ideally also for containers, virtual machines and cloud.
• Experience with service oriented architecture (SOA)
• Extensive experience with software development processes
• Ability to design and solve sophisticated business problems by writing simple, effective code
• Eager to work in multiple programming languages and frameworks and constantly striving to raise technical excellence
• Ability to convince, provide work direction and leadership to colleagues who do not directly report to this role
• Experience mentoring and growing (senior) developers, not through reporting lines, but through thorough and convincing communication is preferred
• Excellent communication skills. Demonstrated ability to use data to influence and drive decisions
• Strong customer focus, passion for doing the right thing for the customer

What we offer:

Benefits & Perks: Global Impact, Personal Relevance

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

• Headquarters located in one of the most dynamic and cosmopolitan cities in Europe: Amsterdam.
• Contribute to a high scale, sophisticated, world-class product and see the real time impact of your work on millions of travelers worldwide.
• Be part of a truly international fast paced environment and performance driven culture.
• Full relocation support for you and your family to move to Amsterdam. We have fine-tuned this process by successfully relocating over 300 Technology professionals to Amsterdam in the last year alone!
• Performance-based company that offers 29 vacation days, career advancement, and lucrative compensation, including bonuses and stock potential.
• Discount on Booking.com accommodations with the “Booking Deal” including other perks and benefits.
• Company-sponsored family and social activities to help our employees become integrated with each other and Dutch culture.
• Diverse and creative colleagues from every corner of the world.
• Health, life, and disability insurance*
• Annual paid time off and generous paid leave scheme including: parent, grandparent, bereavement, and care leave.
• Hybrid working including flexible working arrangements, and up to 20 days per year working from abroad (home country).
• 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, development and mentorship programs, and a complimentary Headspace membership
• On-site meals, coffee, and snacks, including healthy and vegan options, daily*

#ThinkInclusion: Wellbeing & Inclusion at Booking.com:

Inclusion, Diversity, Belonging, Wellbeing and Volunteering (IDBWV) have been a core part of our company culture since day one. This ongoing journey starts with our very own employees, who represent over 140 nationalities and a wide range of ethnic and social backgrounds, genders and sexual orientations.

Take it from our Chief People Officer, Paulo Pisano: “At Booking.com, the diversity of our people doesn’t just create a unique workplace, it also creates a better and more inclusive travel experience for everyone. Inclusion is at the heart of everything we do. It’s a place where you can make your mark and have a real impact in travel and tech.”

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable adjustment to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment.

Booking.com is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. We strive to move well beyond traditional equal opportunity and work to create an environment that allows everyone to thrive.