Software Engineer II (For Independent Contractors)

Details

A Software Engineer II 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 across product features, infrastructure automation, frameworks, tooling, and 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 through standard testing techniques and methods aligned with 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 metrics are violated.
• Reduce business continuity risks and bus factor by applying appropriate 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 and 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.
• Contribute to postmortem processes and track live issues.

Architectural Guidance and Software Systems Design

• Advise product teams on technical solutions that meet functional, nonfunctional, and architectural requirements.
• Evaluate and align target architecture improvements and technical capabilities.
• Evaluate architecture solutions based on cost, business requirements, technology requirements, and emerging technologies.
• Describe the implications of changing existing systems or adding new systems.
• Apply engineering techniques such as prototyping, spiking, and vendor evaluation.
• Design adaptable solutions that meet current and future business needs.

Quality, Improvement, and Communication

• Identify patterns and underlying issues in complex situations and solve them using logical and analytical thinking.
• Identify and implement process, system, and structural improvements.
• Communicate technical decisions clearly, clarify requirements, identify edge cases, and collaborate with product and partners.

Requirements

Must-Have Skills

• TypeScript/Node.js and API development.
• AWS services, including AWS Lambda, queues, workers, orchestration, idempotency, retries, scaling, S3, and DynamoDB.
• Security, observability, testing, CI/CD, and operations.
• Independent end-to-end delivery, including the design, implementation, testing, deployment, and production operation of software solutions with limited supervision.
• Strong programming fundamentals and experience developing with coding agents.
• Unit, integration, and contract testing, including writing testable code and maintaining appropriate test coverage.
• Independent service deployment and monitoring, production issue investigation, and effective use of logs, metrics, and traces.
• Reliability and failure-handling mechanisms such as timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, dead-letter handling, and graceful degradation.
• Observability using meaningful Service Level Indicators, Service Level Objectives, key performance indicators, and alerts.
• Effective collaboration and communication with product and partner teams.

Good-to-Have Skills

• AWS Durable Lambdas for orchestration and execution.
• Evolving APIs and schemas while maintaining backward compatibility.
• Experimentation, continuous delivery, feature flags, and safe rollout strategies.
• Agent programming using a specification-driven development framework such as OpenSpec.

Contract Details

• Independent contractor position.
• Timeline: 1 year, from September 24, 2026, to September 23, 2027.
• Hours: 40 hours per week.