Requirements

• 3+ years managing a team of software engineers, with experience hiring, coaching, and developing talent
• 5–8 years of relevant software development experience building and scaling backend distributed systems
• Proven experience setting up a new team or function, including defining ways of working and establishing engineering culture
• Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures and asynchronous processing (e.g., Kafka, SQS) where reliability and delivery guarantees are critical
• Ownership of critical production systems including observability, incident management, and operational excellence (SLIs/SLOs, dashboards, runbooks)
• Experience building systems requiring transaction traceability, auditability, and accuracy as per financial process standards
• Ability to own delivery end-to-end: from shaping requirements to architecture, implementation, and production ownership
• Strong collaboration skills across multiple teams and domains, aligning stakeholders and driving clear decisions
• Ability to define and own the technical roadmap, making sound architectural decisions with incomplete information
• Prior experience in financial, payments, or fintech domains, including payout orchestration, settlement, reconciliation, or exception handling
• Experience with data integrity and consistency patterns in distributed financial systems (idempotency, exactly-once processing, compensation/saga patterns)
• Experience with AWS-native architectures (SQS, S3, EventBridge, Lambda)
• Must be currently based in the Netherlands; no relocation assistance provided

What You'll Be Doing

• Directly manage and lead engineers, fostering a proactive and collaborative culture
• Nurture and develop engineering talent within the team
• Promote a great culture that innovates, works as a team, partners across Booking.com, and celebrates unified success
• Lead by example and uphold Booking.com’s values in day-to-day work
• Design and architect APIs capable of handling high traffic
• Manage large scale data processing and workflow systems
• Drive engineering delivery, quality, and best practices within your team
• Embed agile ways of working and company values
• Coach and mentor engineers, including technical guidance as needed
• Adhere to architecture, quality, and non-functional requirements principles
• Contribute to best practice evolution across the department
• Drive a culture of ownership and technical excellence including incident escalation handling
• Keep up-to-date with new and existing technologies to apply learnings across projects
• Define, shape, and deliver the product and technical roadmap
• Build new products, processes, and operational plans
• Negotiate on the strategic importance of product roadmap features
• Own architecture across the team and drive innovation

Perks and Benefits

• Brand new office located in the heart of Amsterdam
• 29 days’ paid holiday plus bank holidays
• Daily on-site meals, coffee, and snacks including healthy and vegan options
• Health and well-being benefits including mental health support and access to health insurance
• Employer contribution pension plan
• Industry-leading parental and adoption leave: 22 weeks’ fully paid leave from day one for all new parents
• Great discounts on accommodation, car rentals, and other group benefits
• Carer’s leave: 10 days’ fully paid leave per year for those caring for ill family members
• Hybrid working policy in the Netherlands with at least 40% office attendance and up to 20 days per year to Work from Abroad*