Engineering Manager - Data Machine Learning Platform

Role Description

At Booking.com, data drives our decisions. Technology is at our core. Our Data and Machine Learning department is responsible for ensuring our customer data is compliant with regulatory requirements from all over the world. We build tools to simplify and automate processes, as well as tools for the day-to-day experience of our engineers, data scientists, data stewards and ML engineers.

This is a fantastic opportunity for a strong hands-on Engineering Manager. This role is primarily focused on managing, coaching and developing an engineering team, ensuring the development of both the individual and the team as a whole are in line with organizational objectives and direction. You should be a technically strong role model to help your team advance and develop. The role requires analyzing technology and human talent needs, together with market demand. In addition, you will collaborate and work closely with other leaders, key stakeholders and Machine Learning teams to determine engineering feasibility, cost effectiveness and scalability for new and existing products.

The team you will manage is responsible for our enterprise data catalogue, from ingesting metadata to connecting it to tooling across the company to ensure proper governance of our data.

Responsibilities

People Leadership

• Directly manage engineers
• Lead by example by taking ownership, being proactive and collaborating
• Nurture, grow and develop engineering talent in the team
• Foster a great culture that innovates, works together as a team, partners with other Booking.com teams and roles, and celebrates unified success
• Respect the Booking.com values and use them as a guide to the way we work

Technology, Craft & Delivery

• Design and architect APIs that deal with high traffic
• Work with large-scale data processing and workflow management
• Demonstrate mastery in technology leadership
• Own engineering delivery, quality and practices within your team
• Deliver against wider engineering strategic objectives
• Embed agile ways of working and company values within the team
• Get into the technical detail where required to coach, support and mentor the team
• Adhere to the default principles for architecture, quality and non-functional requirements
• Contribute to the evolution of best practices across the department
• Drive a culture of ownership and technical excellence, including reactive work such as incident escalations
• Learn new technologies and keep abreast of existing technologies to share learnings and apply them to a variety of projects when needed

Architecture & Product Strategy

• Define, shape and deliver the roadmap
• Build new products, processes and operational plans
• Negotiate on the strategic importance of your product roadmap features
• Drive innovation in the team
• Own the architecture across the team

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience in software development, preferably with Java or Python
• At least 3 years of experience leading and managing a team of engineers in a fast-paced and complex environment
• Experience working with Kubernetes and Docker
• Experience in defining and upholding SLOs/KPIs and conducting architecture reviews for systems
• Experience deploying data processing solutions on cloud providers is a plus
• Experience with big data tools such as Spark and Collibra is a plus
• Ability to manage multiple teams is a plus
• A deep understanding of software development in a team, and a track record of developing and shipping software
• Strong technical skills in coding and system design, with the ability to get hands-on with your team if needed
• Excellent communicator with strong stakeholder management experience, good commercial awareness and technical vision
• You have driven successful technical, business and people-related initiatives that improved productivity, performance and quality
• You are a humble and thoughtful technology leader, leading by example and gaining your teammates’ respect through actions, not title
• Analytical skills and a data-driven mindset

Benefits & Perks

• Annual paid time off and generous paid leave scheme including parent, grandparent, bereavement and care leave
• Hybrid working including flexible working arrangements, and up to 20 days per year working from abroad in your home country
• Industry-leading product discounts of up to 1400 per year for yourself, including automatic Genius Level 3 status and Booking.com wallet credit
• Living and working in Amsterdam, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe
• 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
• Opportunity to utilize technical expertise, leadership capabilities and entrepreneurial spirit
• Promote and drive impactful and innovative engineering solutions
• Technical, behavioral and interpersonal competence advancement via on-the-job opportunities, experimental projects, hackathons, conferences and active community participation
• Competitive compensation and benefits package and additional perks of working in the home city of Booking.com