Senior Data Engineer

TBU is part of the third largest e-commerce company in the world (Amazon and Alibaba are bigger) and we are the world’s largest car hire booking service, arranging over 7 million rentals a year in 49,000 locations in 167 countries across 40 languages. Our mission is “Helping people experience the world” and our business and market sector is growing rapidly.

Engineering is a multi-skilled group of over 150 people responsible for providing the technology to enable the Rentalcars.com business. It is a fast paced, dynamic, exciting and driven environment providing services on a 24x7 basis. We provide all the touch points for our online customer experience through a market leading app, a great web site and all the software services and business systems to manage our customers and products. Our goal is to create a great customer experience across all platforms which help us deliver growth for our business.

We have a great journey ahead and our vision is to radically change the working practices to realise our ambition of being a “World Class” engineering function and the “Technology Employer of Choice” in the Northwest and beyond. Make no mistake we have a challenging journey ahead but we are committed to delivering a great customer experience across web, mobile, call centre and partner channels and this is where you could fit in.

TBU direction

At Booking.com we’re working to seamlessly connect every aspect of travel, and the TBU team is one of the cornerstones of our connected trip vision. We’re dedicated to helping travellers uncover the best transport options available to them around the world. To do this we need to offer the broadest selection of bookable transport options, and effortlessly match the right options to the right person at the right time. Our goal is to offer travellers the widest choice and the best customer experience no matter what transport option they choose.

B. Responsible

As a Senior Data Engineer, you’ll join TBU to work alongside curious, fast-paced, and focused people. You are responsible for creating and executing on a vision to have performant, high quality, and scalable data pipelines. You will own the end-to-end execution of technical elements in the Booking.com tech data stack, products and processes and be responsible for, and have the agency to replace the current ad-hoc data solutions with strong foundations built on modern technologies that will make it easy to store real-time customer interactions and make it accessible for data consumers later on.

Senior data engineers are expected to coach and mentor more junior engineers and be a thought leader in their team ensuring best practices are being implemented

Important aspects and responsibilities of the job include:

Data engineering

• Rapidly developing next-generation scalable, flexible, and high-performance data pipelines.
• Solving issues with data and data pipelines and prioritizing based on customer impact.
• End-to-end ownership of data quality in our core datasets and data pipelines.
• Keeping the data complete, accessible, and consumable in an environment of rapid product development
• Be responsible for maintaining data security, integrity and quality by effectively following company standards and best practices
• Write high quality robust code and following standard testing techniques and methods that adhere to the test strategy
• Adhere to the defaults principles for architecture, quality and non-functional requirements
• Build, design and deliver high quality solutions in line with guidance and best practices of the department and contribute to the evolution of best practices
• Collaborate with the team and others to deliver high quality solutions
• Supporting live products in a DevOps environment
• Experimenting with new tools and technologies to meet business requirements regarding performance, scaling, and data quality.
• Challenge ideas and methods while working together with talented, highly skilled team members.
• Providing self-organizing tools that help the analytics community discover data, assess quality, explore usage, and find peers with relevant expertise.
• Contributing to the growth of Booking.com through interviewing, on-boarding, or other recruitment efforts

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
• 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

Architectural guidance

• Has sufficient 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 sufficient 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

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.

Coaching/Mentoring

• Has sufficient knowledge 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

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 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

B. Skilled

We are looking for driven Data Engineers who enjoy solving problems, who initiate solutions and discussions and who believe that any challenge can be scaled with the right mindset and tools. The ones that fit us best are the people who match the following requirements:

• Minimum of 5+ years of experience in the field, using 2 or more server side programming languages — preferably Scala, Java, Python etc.
• Experience with building data pipelines in distributed environments with Kafka, Hadoop, Spark, MySQL, SQLServer etc.
• Demonstrable experience with KSQL, SQL, HQL (Hive), etc.
• Hands on experience of developing in or contributing to open source data technologies, such as Hadoop
• Highly proficient in writing good quality object-oriented code using that is simple, fast under load and robust
• Proficient in the use of design patterns and frameworks such as MVC or Spring
• Good experience of Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Agile
• Quality first mind-set for writing code using techniques such as TDD, BDD or Agile
• Good understanding of security principles and writing secure code
• Knowledge of web services and REST based APIs using JSON and XML
• Solid understanding of SOA
• Experience of working on systems on large scale
• Good understanding of basic analytics and machine learning concepts
• Preferably a university degree in Mathematics or Software Engineering
• Excellent communication, written and spoken

Level of education - Bachelor degree

Years of relevant Job Knowledge - 5 - 8 years

Booking.com 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, colour, 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.