Senior Director Engineering - Connected Trip Experience & Data

Location: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

About Marketplace

Booking.com's Marketplace unit turns travel goals into travel realities. Our purpose? To create frictionless experiences at each and every stage of the trip. From browsing to booking and beyond, our focus is on building the connected experiences which make journeys smoother, faster and more enjoyable. Think of us as travel matchmakers, ensuring seamless integration across our product verticals to effortlessly and intuitively connect traveler preferences and actions.

The Marketplace mission is to truly understand traveller needs and behaviour across multiple verticals, design and implement common traveller-facing product experiences, steward travellers to the right vertical offering, and grow Connected Trips, where travellers not only book hotels or homes, but also flights, car rentals, rides, and local attractions with us. The long-term mission of Marketplace is to grow traveller loyalty through delivering phenomenal product experience, by evolving our customer loyalty program, and by ensuring Booking.com supports our travellers in the right way throughout their trip. Marketplace Business Unit runs the common parts of our website and app, as well as is responsible for key Booking.com-wide capabilities, such as the User Experience, Experimentation Platform, Measurement, and operational Predictive ML models.

Senior Director Engineering - Connected Trip Experience & Data

As a Senior Director Software Development, you are responsible for leading the Connected Trip Experience, Foundational capabilities and Data within the Marketplace Business Function, a department of self steering teams who develop products and constantly innovate to delight our customers.

We hire the best and the brightest professionals, and we empower them to innovate, you need to have:

• First hand experience of building customer centric experiences at scale on AI, Mobile, and web platforms in partnership with Product

• Experience of leading technology organisations at scale

• Demonstrable experience of partnership with senior stakeholders in and out of technology across matrix organisations

• Deep engineering and technology leadership background who can influence and shape our technology narrative including engineering best practice, AI adoption and modernisation

• Demonstrable experience at building and growing a collaborative, high trust and focused organisation

• Demonstrable experience of leading organisations involved in data & AI products & services

Role can be based in Amsterdam or Manchester.

Your focus will be:

• Leading the Technology organisations for Connected Trip Product Experience, Foundations and Data.

• Deeply partnering with Product & Data, planning and delivering to meet our objectives

• Embedding Gen AI into our Customer Experience, Ways of Working and Data platforms

• Continually raising the maturity and capability of the organisation so that we are fast, sharp and focused

• Ensuring your organisation is engaged, focused and resilient.

Desired Outcomes:

• Deliver on Connected Trip product and Data & AI ambition

• Evolve and execute our technology strategy improving tech maturity, scalability, agility, and efficiency, and ensuring future-proofing

• Embed Data & AI deeply into the organisation from a Customer, Builder and Platform perspective

• Deeply embed customer centricity into the habits of your organisation

• Highly engaged, motivated and focused organisation empowered to deliver at speed.

• Technology thought leadership and partnership in and out of Marketplace to drive our strategy forward.

• Ensure the technology strategy is clearly communicated and understood across the organization, and drive adoption and execution.

• Drive alignment and buy-in from both tech and non-tech stakeholders by effectively influencing and collaborating at all levels.

B. Responsible

People & Function Leadership 

• Lead, inspire and motivate your Engineering function through leading by example and setting expectations around what success looks like, giving ownership and providing clarity when necessary

• Line manage Directors and Senior Managers as well as top technical talent, such as Principals.

• Communicate strategy in a compelling manner to multiple teams and relevant stakeholders

• Foster inclusion by holding self and others accountable

• Drive people centric initiatives that enable workforce diversity

• Organisational design, strategy and budget to ensure we are set up to deliver on our strategic agenda

• Partner in and outside of our Business unit to lead and shape the people agenda across Booking.com

• Create a learning environment by coaching, two-way feedback, helping people extract and share personal learnings, and support teams to constantly adapt

• Foster a positive engineering culture who innovate, work as a team and celebrate success

• Build a world class team through nurturing, attracting, and retaining tech talent from around the world

• Empower your teams to do their best work at Booking.com 

• Be curious, learn, iterate and shape our culture 

• Deputise for the VP 

Technology, Craft & Delivery Leadership 

• Create long-term plans that align with the overall focus of the business

• Lead, influence and own delivery within your function including department goals

• Partner with other functions and business units to deliver on our strategic agenda 

• Maintain focus on the end goal, minimise risk and remove roadblocks for our strategic agenda

• Ensure clear and effective communication at all levels: proactively keep all stakeholders informed of what’s happening, upcoming changes, projects, issues and risks 

• Foster mastery in engineering craftsmanship across Booking.com including shaping ways of working

• Own Technology-wide topics and help lead and grow the department

• Embed Agile ways of working and values within the organisation

• Identify problems and significantly improve, change or adapt existing methods and techniques drawing from personal experiences and feedback

• Drive a DevOps culture

Technology, Architecture & Product Strategy 

• Shape, define and build new products, processes and operational plans in alignment with the commercial and financial needs of the business

• Lead, take ownership and shape the technology strategic objectives and roadmaps

• Be a strategic thought partner and influence senior stakeholders across the Accommodations and the broader business to set and align the strategic direction of your function

• Make decisions in complex and ambiguous situations, and guide others in their decision making by recognizing and challenging assumptions, introducing relevant data and multiple perspectives

• Ensure that the Booking architecture principles and engineering practices are adhered to, and that there is direction and alignment for each product. 

• Anticipate the need for changes based on context, and set renewed courses of action to engage teams and achieve goals, while striving to make the impact clear and understandable

• Drive innovation in your function

• Own the architecture across your function

B.Skilled

• Extensive years of Tech Leadership experience 

• Experience with large scale platforms and high traffic (100,000+ visitors per day), preferably E-commerce sites or marketplace companies

• Demonstrable experience of building, shaping and leading a cross functional Engineering function or business unit at scale (150/200+ people) 

• Must understand technology and have a proven track record of designing and building high quality web and mobile applications especially high volume consumer facing applications

• Demonstrable experience of working in Agile environments and more importantly an Agile culture and ethos 

• Demonstrable experience of setting, leading and influencing both the Engineering and Business strategy to the medium and long-term 

• Experience with managing and coaching teams of senior tech leaders including building and growing teams

• Independent, pragmatic and proactive work attitude

• Well versed in Engineering Craftsmanship 

• Cloud based technologies 

• Building a DevOps culture

• Be humble and human 

• Excellent communication skills

• Strong commercial acumen

• Be able to deputise for the VP of Engineering

If your application is successful, your personal data may be used for a pre-employment screening check by a third party as permitted by applicable law. Depending on the vacancy and applicable law, a pre-employment screening may include employment history, education and other information (such as media information) that may be necessary for determining your qualifications and suitability for the position.