Principal Software Engineer

What you'll be doing:

• Lead design of new features in a highly distributed, large scale, global platform that has a direct impact on the business, and on the experience of Booking.com's customers and partners.
• Serve as a tech lead on projects involving multiple teams across and beyond the business unit.
• Hands-on develop proof of concepts and evaluate new technologies.
• Implement technical strategic decisions in cross functional teams.
• Work closely with product owners and engineers to design, implement, and continually improve highly scalable, resilient applications and services.
• Provide technical guidance to other team members.
• Maintain a current understanding of industry and technology trends.
• Communicate and enforce technical standards.
• Advise product and engineering leadership on achieving strategic business objectives.
• Help align architectural direction between business units.
• Support and advise on hiring for senior engineering roles.
• Strengthen the engineering community and coach senior engineers in their further development.

What you'll bring:

• 12+ years of software development experience, with a minimum of 4 years in a principal, lead or architect role.
• Experience mentoring and growing (senior) developers, not through reporting lines, but through thorough and convincing communication is preferred.
• Excellent communication skills. Demonstrated ability to use data to influence and drive decisions.
• Strong customer focus and passion for doing the right thing for the customer.
• Deep experience developing and operating business critical systems.
• Proven hands-on experience in designing, building, improving and operating large scale, high-performance, highly-available and scalable distributed systems in a fast growing environment.
• Expert knowledge of computer science, with strong competencies in SOA, migration and cloud.
• Ability to design and solve complex business problems by writing simple, effective code.
• Eager to work in multiple programming languages and frameworks and constantly striving to raise technical excellence.
• Ability to convince, provide work direction and leadership to colleagues who do not directly report to this role.