Principal Software Engineer

At Booking.com, data drives our decisions. Technology is at our core. And innovation is everywhere. But our company is more than datasets, lines of code or A/B tests. We’re the thrill of the first night in a new place. The excitement of the next morning. The friends you make. The journeys you take. The sights you see. And the food you sample. Through our products, partners and people, we can empower everyone to experience the world.

We’re a truly global e-commerce company, with business operations in nearly every country and city on the planet. And we want to make it easy for everyone, anywhere in the world, to pay for their travel or do business with our platform – whenever and however it’s convenient for them.

Our FinTech business unit – with teams in Amsterdam, London, Bangalore and Shanghai – develops new products and drives innovation to help us continue removing financial friction from the travel process. That makes buying and selling travel-related products and services simpler for both travelers and partners.

As a Principal Software Engineer you will set the technical direction for a group of 50+ engineers and drive strategic projects across teams; through solution design, technical alignment, coaching and hands-on coding. You are a mentor and a visionary who explores new directions to achieve business goals and sets standards for technical excellence.

What you’ll be doing:

• Lead design of new features in a highly distributed, large scale, global platform that has a direct impact on the business, and on the experience of Booking.com’s customers and partners.
• Serve as a tech lead on projects involving multiple teams across and beyond the business unit.
• Hands-on develop proof of concepts and evaluate new technologies.
• Implement technical strategic decisions in cross functional teams.
• Works closely with product owners and engineers to design, implement, and continually improve highly scalable, resilient applications and services.
• Provides technical guidance to other team members.
• Maintain a current understanding of industry and technology trends.
• Communicates and enforces technical standards.
• Advise product and engineering leadership on achieving strategic business objectives.
• Help align architectural directly between business units.
• Support and advice on hiring for senior engineering roles.
• Strengthen the engineering community and coach senior engineers in their further development

What you’ll bring:

• 16+ years of software development experience, with a minimum of 8 years in a principal, lead or architect 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 and passion for doing the right thing for the customer.
• Deep experience developing and operating business critical systems.
• Proven hands-on experience in designing, building, improving and operating large scale, high-performance, highly-available and scalable distributed systems in a fast growing environment.
• Expert knowledge of computer science, with strong competencies in SOA, migration and cloud.
• Ability to design and solve complex 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.

Pre-Employment Screening 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.