Solutions Architect - Cloud Engineering

At Booking.com, our mission is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world. And while that world might feel a little farther away right now, we're busy preparing for when the world is ready to travel once more. With strategic long-term investments into what we believe the future of travel can be, we are opening career opportunities that will have a strong impact on our mission.

Cloud Enablement Teams within Core Infrastructure

Do you want to build software that impacts millions of customers around the world, solving some of the wo rld's most sophisticated ecommerce challenges? We are looking for dedicated infrastructure backend developers to join our Cloud Enablement Teams for Core Infrastructure department in our Manchester office.

In Core Infrastructure we design, build and operate all the technology that our Booking.com product development teams need in order to deliver great travel products to our customers.

This includes, for instance, our on premise data centers, our cloud hosted Kubernetes clusters, MySQL/Cassandra/Elasticsearch database environment, HAProxy load balancers, Envoy service mesh, APigee gateway, Kafka streaming service, Hadoop big data storage, Graphite time series, Grafana dashboard platform, monitoring & alerting tools, CI/CD tooling, Perl/Java/Node.js/Typescript language frameworks and more.
About the role

You will provide solution architecture & design options, taking business requirements and enabling development teams to move complex workloads, built in a hyper scale distributed systems environment, to the public cloud.

You will work collaboratively with tech and business stakeholders to deliver innovative enterprise technology solutions that solve business problems and extract maximum value from our chosen public cloud vendor.

This role requires advanced technical skills to architect sophisticated service-oriented solutions along with well-developed soft skills to efficiently communicate across the business.
Main Responsibilities

• Design a successful highly distributed, large scale platform architecture that enables faster time to market for our customer and partner-facing features
• Bring thought technical leadership including architectural and strategic advice in the areas of architecture principles, technology lifecycles, and standard methodologies related to building a scalable platform.
• Provide guidance on platform performance and reliability targets, including the definition of relevant metrics to be supervised, non-functional requirements and future scalability
• Ensure that the appropriate solution governance, compliance and resilience is built into solutions
• Lead the design and delivery of the architecture and infrastructure required to re-platform and support the Value Leadership business strategy.
• Be an active part of the Architecture Community and the Cloud Center of Excellence. Communicate and implement Architecture Standards within Accommodations Tech.
• Work closely with product owners and engineers to design, implement, continually improve highly scalable applications and services
• Facilitate deep architectural discussions to build confidence and ensure success when implementing these technology solutions
• Be a trusted technical advisor to the Tech ELT; provide technical guidance to other team members
• Promote standard processes creating an everything as code AWS Native experience
• Identify emergent technology trends and opportunities for future growth and development
• Identify long term solutions that emphasize performance, maintainability, and developer experience.

Key Skills

• Expert knowledge and experience in Cloud Engineering and architecture across public cloud technologies including high scale migrations from DataCentre to public cloud providers.
• Strong knowledge in Software Engineering and Solution architecture with strong competencies in data storage solutions (e.g. SQL database(s), NoSQL such as Hadoop, Cassandra) and processing
• Design and take on sophisticated business problems by architecting simple, practical solutions that empower product development
• Deep understanding and hands-on experience designing, building, improving, and operating high-performance, high-availability, and scalable infrastructure that serves millions of visitors per day on an e-commerce platform.
• Extensive knowledge of scalable distributed system strategies (e.g. service-oriented architecture (SOA), microservices, event-driven, or cloud-native), technologies (e.g. load balancers, firewalls, API gateways), and web standards (e.g. micro frontends, REST, GraphQL, web security mechanisms)
• Experience with designing, implementing, and maintaining a service-oriented architecture (SOA), container technologies (e.g. Kubernetes, Docker), services, and API models (e.g. OpenAPI)
• Proficient in modeling the software solutions (C4 model, with focus on C3-C4 levels), design patterns, design principles and building technical roadmaps
• Ability to innovate on business needs by providing a deep architectural and technical expertise that opens new avenues of opportunities and experimentation
• Develop an understanding of business processes, data flows, strategy, and long term thinking to come up with an end-state architecture.
• 9+ years of software development experience, minimum of 4 years in Senior Engineer or Architect role

Critical Leadership Capabilities:

• Strong customer focus and passion for doing the right thing for the customer
• Excellent interpersonal skills
• Demonstrated ability to use data to influence tech/non-tech Executive leaders and drive decisions
• Solve complex technical challenges, establish credibility & build deep relationships with other senior technical leaders
• Ability to "think big" and simultaneously understand and appreciate the details vital to operationalize overarching strategies and goals. The ability to make sense of sophisticated issues and ambiguous situations.
• Challenges assumptions about "the way things are done". Communicates explicitly what must change, why changes are necessary, and possible outcomes and costs. Adjusts communication style to the audience to help them understand and accept the change
• Demonstrates and champions a sense of importance, a "can-do" spirit, a sense of optimism, ownership, and a strong commitment to achieving goals and organizational success.
• Demonstrates a strong sense of ownership and a commitment to achieving significant results.
• Collaboration across multiple teams, stakeholders management in and outside the domain
• Experience mentoring and growing talent

B.Offer

• Living and working in Manchester
• Contributing to a high scale, sophisticated, world-class product and seeing real-time impact of your work on millions of travellers worldwide
• Working in a fast-paced and performance driven culture
• Promote and drive impactful and innovative engineering solutions
• Technical, behavioral and interpersonal competence advancement via on-the-job opportunities, experimental projects, hackathons, conferences and active community participation
• Competitive compensation and benefits package and some great added perks of working in the home city of Booking.com

Booking.com 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, colour, 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.