Booking Holdings Romania - Software Engineer II

Booking Holdings Romania is a Center of Excellence based in Bucharest, Romania and was created to support the increasing business demands of the Booking Holdings Brands. The Center of Excellence provides access to specialized and highly skilled talent, leading industry best practices, and collaboration opportunities across all of our Brands.

As part of our Booking Holdings Romania team, you will have the opportunity to be a part of the world’s leading provider of online travel, with a mission of making it easier for everyone to experience the world through five-primary consumer facing brands: Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, KAYAK and OpenTable.

Role description

We are part of the IT Services department and our main focus is on the tools used by our colleagues from Booking.com along with the colleagues from the other brands of Booking Holdings. Some examples of the products we develop and maintain are: Booking Benefit ,a system which allows our colleagues to have discounts on our platform; Unified Voice Portal, a tool which allows Voice Engineers and IT Support colleagues to provision users into the VoIP systems and to troubleshoot VoIP-related issues; Meeting Rooms Suite, a system which allows meeting rooms management across our offices, Ninja, a tool helping IT Support colleagues to provide the best services to all our colleagues. Here is the technology stack and some of the tools used by the team: Java, Spring Boot, MySQL, Kubernetes, TypeScript, React, Git, Gitlab (MRs, CI/CD), Harness.io (deployment), Grafana, Jira, and more.

This role provides a hybrid way of working with an onsite presence of 2 days/week.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties

Building software applications

• Is responsible to build software applications by using relevant development languages and applying knowledge of systems, services and tools appropriate for the business area

• Is responsible to write readable and reusable code by applying standard patterns and using standard libraries

• Is responsible to refactor and simplify code by introducing design patterns when necessary

• Is responsible to ensure the quality of the application by following standard testing techniques and methods that adhere to the test strategy

• Is responsible to maintain data security, integrity and quality by effectively following company standards and best practices

End to End System Ownership

• Has sufficient knowledge to own a service end to end by actively monitoring application health and performance, setting and monitoring relevant metrics and act accordingly when violated

• Has sufficient knowledge to reduce business continuity risks and bus factor by applying state-of-the-art practices and tools, and writing the appropriate documentation such as runbooks and OpDocs

• Has sufficient knowledge to reduce risk and obtain customer feedback by using continuous delivery and experimentation frameworks

• Has sufficient knowledge to independently manage an application or service by working through deployment and operations in production

Technical Incident Management

• Is responsible to address and resolve live production issues by mitigating the customer impact within SLA

• Is responsible to improve the overall reliability of systems by producing long term solutions through root cause analysis

• Is responsible to keep track of incidents by contributing to postmortem processes and logging live issues

Architectural Guidance

• Has basic knowledge to advise product teams towards a technical solution that meets the functional, nonfunctional & architectural requirements by challenging the rationale for an application design and providing context in the wider architectural landscape

• Has basic knowledge to set a clear direction for a technical capability by evaluating and aligning the target architecture improvements, reframing architectural designs and decisions for varied stakeholder

Software Systems Design

• Has sufficient knowledge to evaluate possible architecture solutions by taking into account cost, business requirements, technology requirements and emerging technologies

• Has sufficient knowledge to describe the implications of changing an existing system or adding a new system to a specific area, by having a broad, high-level understanding of the infrastructure and architecture of our systems

• Has sufficient knowledge to help grow the business and/or accelerate software development by applying engineering techniques (e.g. prototyping, spiking and vendor evaluation) and standards

• Has sufficient knowledge to meet business needs by designing solutions that meet current requirements and are adaptable for future enhancements

Critical Thinking

• Is responsible to systematically identify patterns and underlying issues in complex situations, and to find solutions by applying logical and analytical thinking.

• Is responsible to constructively evaluate and develop ideas, plans and solutions by reviewing them, objectively taking into account external knowledge, initiating 'SMART' improvements and articulating their rationale.

Continuous Quality and Process Improvement

• Has sufficient knowledge to identify opportunities for process, system and structural improvements (i.e performance gains) by examining and evaluating current process flows, methods and standards.

• Has sufficient knowledge to design and implement relevant improvements by defining adapted/new process flows, standards, and practices that enable business performance.

Effective Communication

• Is responsible to deliver clear, well-structured, and meaningful information to a target audience by using suitable communication mediums and language tailored to the audience

• Is responsible to achieve mutually agreeable solutions by staying adaptable, communicating ideas in clear coherent language and practising active listening

• Is responsible to ask relevant (follow-up) questions to properly engage with the speaker and really understand what they are saying, by applying listening and reflection techniques

Role Qualifications and Requirements

• 3 - 5 years of relevant experience

• Bachelor’s Degree

• Java (Spring Boot)

• Experience in working on a large distributed systems

• Docker/Kubernetes

• Experience with GIT, with CI/CD pipelines (Gitlab)

• Experience with databases (MySQL preferred)

• Front-end experience (React, NextJS, TypeScript)

• Nice-to-have: experience with Kafka, Redis, Slack API, Google Workspaces API, Jira API

Benefits & Perks

• Contributing to a high scale, complex, world renowned product and seeing real-time impact of your work on millions of travelers worldwide

• Working in a fast-paced and performance driven culture

• Technical, behavioral and interpersonal competence advancement via on-the-job opportunities, experimental projects, hackathons, conferences and active community participation

• Competitive compensation and benefits package

• Vast amounts of data to validate your ideas and the opportunity to experiment with real users

Booking Holdings 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.

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.