Senior Software Engineer I

About Booking Holdings' Financial Systems Department

The Financial Systems organization, specifically the FinTax team within the Tax Tech track, is responsible for managing the revenue lifecycle across Booking.com's business verticals. This team provides crucial support to supply partners and internal finance stakeholders.

About the FinTax For Business Team

As a vital part of the Tax Tech track, the FinTax For Business team is the architect of the future-proof tax rules, data collection, and determination engine. This engine empowers the Billing Platform and Payments Platform to accurately and compliantly collect taxes from our supply partners. The team is dedicated to delivering critical "Must-Do" priorities and seeks a motivated engineer to help achieve its long-term architectural and business objectives.

Role Overview

This role involves being a key contributor in the definition, design, and construction of a long-term Tax Platform for all Booking Holdings brands. You will collaborate closely with Finance stakeholders to deeply understand business requirements and work in tandem with product teams across various Business Units to bring the long-term vision to life.

Key Job Responsibilities

As a Senior Software Engineer I, you will drive the development, performance, and scaling of internal systems. You will operate with a high degree of autonomy and be instrumental in making key technical decisions within the team. Key aspects of this role include:

• Rapidly developing next-generation scalable, flexible, and high-performance systems, with end-to-end ownership by monitoring and adjusting SLIs and SLOs.
• Proactively solving issues within internal systems, prioritizing based on customer and business impact.
• Serving as an effective intermediary for complex problems, communicating clearly with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Contributing to a robust testing environment, essential for thousands of concurrently running experiments.
• Evaluating customer needs and devising optimal solutions, assessing various languages (e.g., Java), architectures, and associated risks.
• Supporting the growth of Booking.com through active participation in interviewing, on-boarding, and other recruitment efforts.

Role Qualifications and Requirements

We are seeking driven Software Engineers who excel at problem-solving, proactively initiate solutions and discussions, and possess the belief that any challenge can be overcome with the right approach and tools. Ideal candidates will possess:

• Strong programming skills with experience in at least two server-side programming languages.
• A minimum of 7 years of software development experience.
• Proven experience with Java, Kubernetes, Kafka, and AWS.
• Demonstrated experience with both relational and non-relational databases.
• Previous experience working with distributed systems.
• Experience with AWS cloud-native solutions.
• Experience working on products that impact a large customer base is highly advantageous.
• Full end-to-end ownership of systems and comfort with incident management.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills, with the ability to cooperate effectively at all organizational levels.
• Proactive initiative to address the broader technical needs of your product, always prioritizing the customer.
• The drive to execute successful technical and business initiatives that enhance productivity, performance, and quality.
• A proactive, "can do" attitude, anticipating and addressing technical needs.
• Advanced System Architecture: Proven ability to architect complex, large-scale distributed systems, defining architectural standards and guiding teams in designing observable, reliable systems capable of processing high-volume metadata across diverse assets.
• Technical Leadership: Demonstrated experience in owning and leading technical projects, partnering with non-technical leadership, negotiating complex requirements, and driving alignment on technical solutions.
• Operational Excellence: Proven ability to maintain the uptime of critical systems, with a strong understanding of reliability, troubleshooting, and incident management.
• Business Acumen: The ability to deeply understand business contexts, articulate complex concepts, and make pragmatic technical decisions.
• Prior experience in mentoring, coaching, and training team members would be a significant plus.
• Excellent written and spoken communication skills.