Senior Software Engineer (For Independent Contractors)

Details

A Senior Software Engineer I owns the execution of technical elements in the Booking.com tech stack, products, and processes. The role is responsible for implementing technical solutions based on business requirements, estimating effort and impact, and delivering high-quality software.

The engineer works with colleagues in other roles to design, prioritize, and implement technical tasks. The work may include product features, infrastructure automation, frameworks, tooling, or services.

Responsibilities

Building Software Applications

• Build software applications using relevant development languages and knowledge of systems, services, and tools appropriate for the business area.
• Write readable and reusable code using standard patterns and libraries.
• Refactor and simplify code by introducing design patterns when necessary.
• Ensure application quality by following standard testing techniques and methods that adhere to the test strategy.
• Maintain data security, integrity, and quality by following company standards and best practices.

End-to-End System Ownership

• Own services end to end by monitoring application health and performance, setting and monitoring relevant metrics, and acting when thresholds are violated.
• Reduce business continuity risks and bus factor by applying state-of-the-art practices and tools and writing documentation such as runbooks and OpDocs.
• Reduce risk and obtain customer feedback through continuous delivery and experimentation frameworks.
• Independently manage applications or services through deployment and production operations.

Technical Incident Management

• Address and resolve live production issues while mitigating customer impact within SLA.
• Improve system reliability through root cause analysis and long-term solutions.
• Track incidents by contributing to postmortem processes and logging live issues.

Architectural Guidance and Software Systems Design

• Advise product teams on technical solutions that meet functional, nonfunctional, and architectural requirements.
• Challenge application design rationale and provide context within the wider architectural landscape.
• Set direction for technical capabilities by evaluating target architecture improvements and aligning architectural designs and decisions.
• Evaluate architecture solutions based on cost, business requirements, technology requirements, and emerging technologies.
• Describe the implications of changing existing systems or adding new systems through a broad understanding of infrastructure and system architecture.
• Apply engineering techniques such as prototyping, spiking, and vendor evaluation to grow the business and accelerate software development.
• Design solutions that meet current business needs and support future enhancements.

Critical Thinking and Continuous Improvement

• Identify patterns and underlying issues in complex situations and find solutions through logical and analytical thinking.
• Review and objectively evaluate ideas, plans, and solutions while initiating SMART improvements and articulating their rationale.
• Identify opportunities for process, system, and structural improvements by examining current processes, methods, and standards.
• Design and implement improvements by defining adapted or new process flows, standards, and practices.

Communication

• Deliver clear, well-structured, and meaningful information to target audiences using suitable communication methods and language.
• Achieve mutually agreeable solutions through adaptability, clear communication, and active listening.
• Ask relevant follow-up questions to properly engage with speakers and understand their perspectives.

Requirements

Required Tech Stack and Knowledge

• Building AI workflows
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• AWS
• Java

Python is an advantage.