Booking Holdings Romania - Engineering Manager

About Us

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 six-primary consumer facing brands: Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, KAYAK, OpenTable and Rentalcars.com.

Account Security

Booking.com's Account Security team is responsible for protecting the world's largest travel platform against attacks to its account & authorization systems. We are forming a new team without our Bucharest Center of Excellence that will help drive security initiatives, protecting the security and privacy of all our customers, partners, and employees.

Role description

The role of Engineering Manager is to primarily lead, coach and develop an engineering team, ensuring the development of both (the individual and team as a whole) are in line with organizational objectives and direction. Manages all activities of an engineering in scope through the direction of activities, to design new products and modify existing designs, ensuring that deliverables are on time and with acceptable quality. The role holder is required to analyze technology trends, human resource needs, and market demand to plan projects to ensure resilience in line with current demand and future ambition. In addition to this, the role will confer with leaders, production, key stakeholders and marketing teams to determine engineering feasibility, cost effectiveness, scalability and time-to-market for new and existing products.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties

Managing People

• Is responsible to inspire, grow and develop individuals by helping the creation of their personal development plan, leveraging available learning resources and offering stretch opportunities.
• Is responsible to manage underperformance by setting and reviewing performance objectives and KPIs, providing timely feedback and collaborating with HR counterparts.

Managing Teams

• Is responsible to get things done in the right way by taking ownership, being proactive and collaborating with business counterparts, peers, other craft managers and stakeholders.
• Is responsible to ensure delivery by tracking team health metrics and KPIs, monitoring roadmap progress, identifying blockers and resolving or escalating them.
• Is responsible to manage the team's stakeholders by reporting progress and blockers in a clear and timely manner.
• Is responsible to plan and manage headcount by actively participating and involving own team in recruitment efforts and planning processes.

Coaching/Mentoring

• Is responsible to coach, guide and improve the overall performance of stakeholders and colleagues at all levels, when appropriate, by sharing experience, knowledge and approaches to work.

End to End System Ownership

• Is responsible to own a service end to end by actively monitoring application health and performance, setting and monitoring relevant metrics and act accordingly when violated and guide more junior members of the team in this topic.
• Is responsible 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 and guide more junior members of the team in this topic.
• Is responsible to reduce risk and obtain customer feedback by using continuous delivery and experimentation frameworks and guide more junior members of the team in this topic.
• Is responsible to independently manage an application or service by working through deployment and operations in production and guide more junior members of the team in this topic.

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

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 and guide more junior members of the team in this topic.
• Is responsible to write readable and reusable code by applying standard patterns and using standard libraries and guide more junior members of the team in this topic.
• Is responsible to refactor and simplify code by introducing design patterns when necessary and guide more junior members of the team in this topic.
• Is responsible to ensure the quality of the application by following standard testing techniques and methods that adhere to the test strategy and guide more junior members of the team in this topic.
• Is responsible to maintain data security, integrity and quality by effectively following company standards and best practices, guiding more junior members of the team in this topic.

Architectural Guidance

• Is responsible 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
• Is responsible 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

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

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

• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science or related field
• 2+ years of managing a team of 5 people
• Ability to proactively manage multiple projects, a magnitude of stakeholders and intensive schedule
• Ability to improvise and maintain productive healthy atmosphere within and outside of your team
• Experience building an Enterprise Data Warehouse from scratch
• Experience with Snowflake
• Experience with data modeling: Conceptual, Data Vault, Dimensional
• Experience with DBT, SQL, Python
• Experience with AWS, K8S, Java, Terraform
• Experience working with complex (column / field level) IAM services
• Knowledge of data governance requirements and tooling, e.g. based on DAMA
• Strong knowledge of data quality requirements and implementation methodologies
• Excellent English communication skills, both written and verbal.

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.