Job Description

Locations: Bucharest, Romania

Categories: Engineering

Req ID: 30007

Booking Holdings Romania is a Center of Excellence based in Bucharest, Romania and was created to support the increasing business demands of the Booking Holdings Brands. The Center of Excellence provides access to specialized and highly skilled talent, leading industry best practices, and collaboration opportunities across all of our Brands.

As part of our Booking Holdings Romania team, you will have the opportunity to be a part of the world’s leading provider of online travel, with a mission of making it easier for everyone to experience the world through six-primary consumer facing brands: Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, KAYAK, OpenTable and Rentalcars.com.

Role description

At Booking Holdings, scaling our platform is not just a goal; it is a mission-critical requirement. We process massive amounts of data and traffic daily, requiring fault-tolerant, highly available, and secure infrastructure. We are seeking a Senior Java Software Engineer to drive technical excellence, architect scalable solutions, and mentor the next generation of engineers in our Bucharest Centre of Excellence.

In this role, you will go beyond writing code. You will shape the architecture of our distributed systems—whether you are designing mechanisms to thwart cyber threats, integrating major global travel partners, or building platform tools that empower hundreds of internal engineering teams.

This role provides a hybrid way of working with an onsite presence of 2 days/week.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties

• Design for Scale: Design and evolve scalable, resilient backend services for high-traffic distributed systems, making sound technical trade-offs.
• End-to-End Ownership: Own the full software lifecycle—from design and implementation to deployment, monitoring, and production support.
• Technical Leadership: Raise the engineering bar through code reviews, mentoring, technical design discussions, and driving improvements beyond your own work.
• Drive Reliability: Improve system reliability through observability, automation, and operational excellence.
• Collaborate & Influence: Partner effectively with engineers, product managers, and architects, influencing technical decisions and driving initiatives to successful delivery.

Tech you’ll use:

• Core: Java (Spring Boot) at scale, alongside Python or other server-side languages.
• Data & Event-Driven Architecture: Kafka Streams, Cassandra, DynamoDB, Redis, relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL).
• Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Serverless architectures, Terraform.
• CI/CD & Monitoring: GitLab, Harness, Grafana, OpenTelemetry.

Role Qualifications and Requirements

• Experience: 5+ years of backend software engineering experience with strong Java expertise and demonstrated ownership of complex production systems.
• Distributed Systems: Demonstrated experience designing, building, and operating scalable microservices, SOA, or event-driven architectures in cloud environments (AWS preferred).
• Cloud & Cloud-Native Engineering: Proven experience building and operating applications on AWS, with hands-on knowledge of cloud-native patterns including load balancing, API gateways, resilience, observability, and container orchestration.
• AI-Driven Engineering: Proven ability to leverage modern AI development tools (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, or similar) to accelerate software delivery, improve engineering quality, and actively coach teammates on effective AI-assisted development practices.
• Technical Influence: Demonstrated experience leading technical initiatives, influencing stakeholders, and driving alignment across teams without direct authority.
• Problem Solving: Strong analytical skills with demonstrated ability to troubleshoot complex production issues, make sound technical decisions, and consistently deliver reliable software.

Benefits & Perks

• Contributing to a high scale, complex, world renowned product and seeing real-time impact of your work on millions of travelers worldwide
• Working in a fast-paced and performance driven culture
• Technical, behavioral and interpersonal competence advancement via on-the-job opportunities, experimental projects, hackathons, conferences and active community participation
• Competitive compensation and benefits package
• Vast amounts of data to validate your ideas and the opportunity to experiment with real users

Booking Holdings 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, color, 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.

Pre-Employment Screening

If your application is successful, your personal data may be used for a pre-employment screening check by a third party as permitted by applicable law. Depending on the vacancy and applicable law, a pre-employment screening may include employment history, education and other information (such as media information) that may be necessary for determining your qualifications and suitability for the position.