Software Engineer II – Geo Intelligence (Marketplace)

at Booking.com

📍 Tel Aviv, Israel

EUR 65-101 per hour

MIDDLE

✅ Hybrid ✅ On-site

✅ Contract / Freelance

Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

AI API @ 3 Automated Testing Compliance Data Pipelines Design Patterns Distributed Systems @ 3 GEO JVM @ 3 Java @ 3 Machine Learning Observability @ 6 Python Search Engines @ 3 Security Spring Boot

Details

For independent contractors. The Geo Intelligence team develops Booking.com's geo-intelligence platform, delivering geographic data, routing, and spatial models through APIs used for search, relevance, maps, partner onboarding, and compliance.

The role owns technical execution across the geo platform, data pipelines, and related processes. This includes implementing solutions for product, machine learning, and compliance consumers; estimating effort and impact; maintaining high-quality production code and test automation; and collaborating with product managers, data scientists, geo analysts, and engineers.

Responsibilities

Build and evolve geo services, including geo data, search, routing, and geocoding APIs, using Java and modern service frameworks.
Apply geospatial systems, services, and tools, including spatial queries, geometry handling, and relationships between geo objects.
Refactor and simplify existing services using standard design patterns and libraries.
Ensure application quality through automated testing, geo-dataset validation, and API contract tests.
Maintain data security, integrity, and quality in accordance with company standards and geo-data governance practices.
Own geo services end to end, including monitoring health, latency, availability, and data freshness; setting service levels; and responding to violations.
Manage service deployment and production operations, including publishing data to downstream consumers.
Write runbooks and operational documentation, and reduce business continuity risk and bus factor.
Address production incidents such as incorrect geo data, wrong location assignments, and API degradation; perform root-cause analysis and contribute to postmortems.
Advise consuming teams on correct integration with geo data and APIs and contribute to the technical direction of geo capabilities.
Evaluate architecture solutions based on cost, consumer requirements, data quality, latency, and third-party data providers.
Design adaptable solutions for route-aware search, itinerary building blocks, spatial indexing, and AI-ready geo data.
Improve geo-data governance, automated validation, and self-service consumer onboarding.
Communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including product teams, data scientists, legal, and compliance.
Participate in an on-call rotation if required.

Requirements

Solid experience building and operating backend services in Java or another JVM language.
Production experience with REST APIs and relational databases.
Experience with distributed systems and data flows, such as event streaming, search engines, and cloud data platforms.
Strong testing, observability, and operational practices.
Experience validating, reconciling, and reasoning about large datasets and data quality.