Booking Holdings Romania - Senior Software Engineer - Pipeline

Role Description

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.

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

Role description

Join the team in our Bucharest Centre of Excellence, collaborating closely with international engineering hubs to drive the technical evolution of our global platform. You’ll help expand platform capabilities by integrating new business verticals, scaling high-traffic public-facing APIs, automating core partner and operational workflows, and modernizing existing internal systems.

This is a high-impact opportunity to design and build next-generation distributed systems engineered for resilience, low latency, and massive scale. As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll take end-to-end ownership across the entire software lifecycle, from architectural decisions, clean code design, and automated testing to CI/CD pipelines, production monitoring, and SRE best practices. Working autonomously within a collaborative engineering culture, you will partner directly with Product, UX, and cross-functional teams to turn strategic goals into reliable, production-ready software.

You’ll work in a modern, cloud-native ecosystem centered around Java (Spring Boot), event-driven architectures (Kafka), relational and distributed databases, container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker), and cloud infrastructure (AWS). We champion software craftsmanship, continuous delivery, and data-driven decision-making, giving you clear visibility into how your work directly impacts millions of users worldwide.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties

Software Engineering & System Architecture

• Design & Scalability: Architect, develop, and scale high-performance public APIs and resilient backend microservices capable of handling massive traffic spikes and complex partner workflows.
• Vertical Integration & Self-Service: Build next-generation capabilities to expand self-service onboarding for partners, automate backend operational tasks, and integrate new travel verticals.
• Craftsmanship & Code Quality: Write clean, maintainable, readable, and reusable code by applying robust design patterns (DDD), comprehensive test strategies (TDD/automation), and regular refactoring to sustain rapid development velocity.
• Architectural Guidance: Translate business requirements into future-proof technical solutions, evaluate emerging technologies and vendor integrations, and guide technical direction while managing trade-offs around cost, latency, and complexity.

End-to-End System Ownership & Operational Excellence

• Full-Lifecycle Ownership: Independently take ownership of services in production, driving continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, automated deployments, and experimentation frameworks.
• Reliability & Observability: Monitor application health by defining and tracking SLIs, SLOs, and key telemetry metrics using cloud-native monitoring toolchains (e.g., Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Incident Management: Triage, mitigate, and resolve production incidents within established SLAs, conduct systematic root-cause analyses, log live issues, and author postmortems and operational runbooks to eliminate single points of failure.

Collaboration, Leadership & Culture

• Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate with peers, architects, and product managers to align technical roadmaps with business objectives.
• Mentorship & Quality Standards: Drive peer code reviews, champion engineering best practices, and mentor fellow engineers on backend architecture, system design, and AI-assisted engineering tools.
• Continuous Improvement: Actively evaluate workflows and engineering standards to introduce process, system, and performance improvements across the team.
• Talent Growth: Support the growth of the Bucharest engineering hub through technical interviews, onboarding, and recruitment initiatives.

Role Qualifications and Requirements

• Backend Development: Proven commercial software engineering experience building and maintaining high-throughput, enterprise-grade systems using at least two server-side languages (e.g., Java, Python, NodeJS, or TypeScript), with deep expertise in Java and the Spring Boot ecosystem.
• Distributed Systems & Microservices: Hands-on experience designing and operating distributed, event-driven architectures, microservices, and high-volume public and internal APIs.
• Messaging & Data Storage: Strong working knowledge of event-streaming and caching platforms (e.g., Kafka, Kafka Streams, Redis) and relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL); experience with NoSQL systems (DynamoDB, Cassandra) is a plus.
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Solid grounding in cloud-native platforms (AWS preferred), containerization, and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), along with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and modern CI/CD tooling (GitLab, Harness).
• Modern Engineering Practices: Demonstrated track record applying Test-Driven Development (TDD), Domain-Driven Design (DDD), SRE principles, secure coding standards, and modern observability frameworks.
• Modern Tooling: Familiarity with leveraging modern developer productivity tools, including AI-assisted development workflows (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot).

• End-to-End Problem Solving: Strong critical thinking and analytical skills to systematically dissect complex technical challenges and evaluate architecture for business impact.
• Communication & Stakeholder Management: Excellent written and verbal English communication skills, with the ability to articulate technical concepts and trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Autonomous Leadership: Ability to deliver high-impact work independently within an empowered team, take initiative on architectural improvements, and influence cross-team technical decisions without direct authority.
• Education: A University degree (Bachelor’s or Master’s) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent practical experience.

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.