JOB DESCRIPTION FOR:

　　Director of Engineering Application Data Services

　　About Booking.com

　　Established in 1996 in Amsterdam, Booking.com has grown from a small Dutch start-up to one of the largest ecommerce companies in the world. Booking.com is the largest business within Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG) and accounts for the vast majority of Booking Holdings' total revenue. Booking Holdings is a leading Fortune 500 e-commerce conglomerate with a market cap of roughly $75 billion (2022). Booking.com currently employs approximately 10,000 employees in 120+ offices in 70 countries worldwide.

　　With a mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world, Booking.com invests in digital technology that helps take the friction out of travel. Booking.com connects travelers with the world's largest selection of incredible places to stay, including everything from apartments, vacation homes, and family-run B&Bs to 5-star luxury resorts and even tree houses. The Booking.com website and mobile apps are available in over 40 languages, offer more than 28,984,513 total reported listings, and cover 142,259 destinations in 229 countries worldwide. Each day, more than 1,550,000 room nights are reserved on its platform. So whether travelling for business or leisure, customers can instantly book their ideal accommodation quickly and easily, without booking fees and backed up by its promise to price match. Via the customer experience team, customers can reach Booking.com 24/7 for assistance and support in over 40 languages, any time of the day or night.

　　At Booking.com, we are all involved in making hundreds of decisions every day. The decisions we make are a reflection of our Values - they reflect what is important to us, both as individuals and as an organisation.

　　When Values are made explicit, they provide clarity on what "good" looks like. And when they are shared, they build unity in a group. They build culture. Think customer first. We obsess about adding new value for our customers - guests, partners, colleagues - to make it easier for everyone to experience the world. Own it. We deliver on our promises, make informed decisions and prioritize to get the important things done today. Learn forever. We are resilient, take time to reflect, and seek to learn - from colleagues, from the outside world and from our failures. Succeed together. We celebrate team success, through making connections, building trust and valuing the diverse perspectives of others. Do the right thing. We get the right results the right way. For each other, our communities and the world around us. Booking.com continues to grow and expand its service offerings to customers, including the 'Connected Trip' , Financial Services (FinTech) expansion in the United States and other exciting growth strategies.

　　Booking.com's main company strategy, the Connected Trip vision is being orchestrated through connected data, and we need a Director of Application Data Services that matches our ambitions.

　　Profile Director of Engineering Application Data Services

　　The Central Tech business unit builds, maintains and continuously improves our technological foundation, which touches every single aspect of our business. These teams work together to ensure we collect data responsibly, use it reliably, and stay on top of the latest trends and techniques. From ensuring robust user privacy practices to growing machine learning innovations to making sure every device that connects us is 100% cybersecure, this business unit solves a lot of responsibility. Central Tech at Booking.com is a critical enabler of the Booking.com overall mission towards the connected trip.

　　To unlock the connected trip: the Application Data Services (ADS) organization is accountable for providing services that are supporting critically important data stores across all of Booking.com's business units. These services are in the critical part of revenue generating applications and other critically important applications and therefore integral part of our connected trip vision.

　　We currently run the third largest operational store environment in the world and are actively working on feature modernization and cloud migration of these datastores. As this is a greenfield situation you will have the ability to strategize and executive how this will look like in the cloud. You will create a vision and strategy of the future landscape & modernize the data ecosystem to the cloud influencing team & collaborators. The backend stores ADS is responsible for all of Booking's SQL, NoSQL, caching, search and streaming platform.

　　This team (40+) runs EU largest MySQL set up, as well as Data Streaming Platform, Cassandra, ElasticSearch, image and messaging services (300+ services in total) as internally handled products for the whole Booking.com business.

　　We have embarked on modernization efforts to see how we can continue to support these critical data services using a hybrid approach that spans on-premise and public cloud environments. This involves taking a critical look at current services footprint how we see those evolving in the current environment and how we provide the same level of services in a public cloud.

　　This is a highly visible and foundational role in the core of our platform. Pivotal to our company's success and highly connected to our company's revenue stream.

　　You will be located in Amsterdam (The Netherlands.)

　　Responsibilities:

　　People & Function leadership: Lead, inspire and empower your Engineering function through leading by example and defining what success looks like, giving ownership and providing clarity when vital l Lead Senior Managers as well as top technical talent, such as Principals Communicate strategy in a compelling manner to multiple teams and relevant collaborators Champion inclusion by holding self and others accountable Drive people centric initiatives that enable workforce diversity Partner in and outside of our Business unit to lead and shape the people agenda across Booking.com Create a learning environment by coaching, maintaining two-way feedback, helping people extract and share personal learnings, and supporting teams to constantly adapt Champion the engineering culture; innovate, work as a team and celebrate success Build a best-in-class team through cultivating, attracting, and retaining tech talent from around the world Empower your teams to do their best work at Booking.com Be curious, learn, iterate and shape our culture Technology Craft & Delivery leadership: Lead, influence and own delivery within your function including department goals Partner with other functions and business units to deliver on our strategic agenda Maintain focus on the end goal, minimise risk and remove roadblocks for our strategic agenda Ensure clear and effective communication at all levels: proactively keep all collaborators informed of what's happening, upcoming changes, projects, issues and risks Champion mastery in engineering craftsmanship across Booking.com including shaping ways of working Own Technology-wide topics and help lead and grow the department Embed Agile WoW and values within the organisation Identify problems and significantly improve, change or adapt existing methods and techniques drawing from personal experiences and feedback Drive a DevOps culture Technology, Architecture and Product strategy Shape, define and build new services, processes and operational plans in alignment with the needs of the business Lead, take ownership and shape the technology strategic objectives and roadmaps Be a strategic thought partner and influence collaborators across the Booking.com and align the strategic direction of your function Make decisions in sophisticated and ambiguous situations, and guide others in their decision making by recognizing and validate assumptions, introducing relevant data and multiple perspectives Ensure that the Booking architecture principles and engineering practices are adhered to, and that there is direction and alignment for each product Anticipate the need for changes based on context, and set renewed courses of action to engage teams and achieve goals, while aspiring to make the impact clear and understandable Drive innovation in your function Own the architecture across your function Ideal Experience & Skills: Significant years of leadership experience. Leadership must have; collaborator, inclusive leadership styles (size 50+) Collaborator management, Cross functional partnering. Partnering with leadership. Organisational change & transformation (e.g from on-prem to AWS, cloud to cloud or cloud to hybrid). Building a Devops culture. Agile. Most important Tech skills prioritized for this role: MySQL (!) ideally real world experience of SQL deployment management experience. Cassandra and or Kafka experience is a huge plus. Nice to have: Familiarity with AWS native services (RDS, DynamoDB, Kinesis, MSK et), Experience leading large operational data stores and streaming solutions including databases setups of 1000+ instances and streaming solutions that can push billions of records per minute.. Experience leading teams through ground-breaking change such as moving on-prem tools to public cloud. Experience leading high criticality backend systems with operational responsibility that require uptime SLAs. OTHER PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS Independent, pragmatic and proactive work attitude Be humble and human. Excellent communication skills Strong commercial competence Open mind, learning attitude, clear behavior, positive, multitasker, proactive and collaborative. Strategic problem solver yet focused on execution; able to roll up sleeves to get things done. Able to function in a fast-moving entrepreneurial environment. Data driven, experimental, ready to learn and open to change. Keep the customer at the centre of everything you do. Good cultural and organizational sensitivity. Committed to building a diverse, inclusive work environment. 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.