Backend Developer - Experimentation Track - Accommodations

Job Description

At Booking.com, data drives our decisions. Technology is at our core. And innovation is everywhere. But our company is more than datasets, lines of code or A/B tests. We’re the thrill of the first night in a new place. The excitement of the next morning. The friends you make. The journeys you take. The sights you see. And the food you sample. Through our products, partners and people, we can empower everyone to experience the world.

With over 1.6 million room nights booked every day, accommodation represents the largest share of our business to date. We are responsible for accommodation growth, with clear ownership of all marketing, product and supply related to accommodations. Our mission is to deliver the best customer experience and most varied selection of properties.

In the Experiment Track we build solutions for A/B testing; variant assignment and raw data generation. Our stack is written mostly in perl and C, but we directly support clients in perl, java, nodejs and python to enable all products and platforms at Booking to run experiments.

For us the end customer is always the priority and our solutions are designed for multi-level resiliency and graceful degradation. Data quality closely follows as a priority. We generate up to 400 thousand kafka messages per second and you can find experiment tracking information in most of the events generated by booking frontend. The variant assignment is happening over one million times per second across the entire company and we measure its latency in microseconds. Scalability and multi-level retries ensure that all of the data makes it to the processing pipelines.

B.Responsible

As a Software Developer, you are responsible for the development, performance, and scaling of our public website as well as internal systems. You will work independently and will also be responsible for making technical decisions within a team.

Important aspects of the job include:

• Rapidly developing next-generation scalable, flexible, and high-performance systems.
• Solving issues with the site and internal systems, prioritizing based on customer impact
• Acting as an intermediary for problems, with both technical and non-technical audiences
• Testing; we run thousands of experiments running at one time. We built one of the most advanced A/B testing platforms in the industry.
• Most products are developed in Perl or Java, but not all. Perl is very effective when it comes to rapid prototyping, which our product development teams do a lot of. It’s not necessary to know Perl before you start, but it helps. We are not just using the language, we influence the future of the language.
• Contributing to the growth of Booking.com through interviewing, on-boarding, or other recruitment efforts

B.skilled

We are looking for driven Developers who enjoy solving problems, who initiate solutions and discussions and who believe that any challenge can be scaled with the right mindset and tools.

We have found that people who match the following requirements are the ones who fit us best:

• Minimum of 3 years software development experience; using 2 or more server side programming languages. Preferably Java, Perl, Python, Scala, C++ etc.
• Demonstrable experience with MySQL / PostgreSQL or similar relational databases
• Hands on experience of developing in and contributing to open source data technologies
• Previous experience with building data workflows in the Hadoop ecosystem is preferred
• Experience of working on products that impact a large customer base is an advantage
• Preferably a university degree in Mathematics or Software Engineering
• Excellent communication; written and spoken

B.offered

• An opportunity to contribute to a high scale, complex, world renowned product and seeing real time impact of your work on millions of travelers worldwide.
• Be part of a truly international fast paced environment and performance driven culture.
• Various opportunities to grow technically and personally via side projects, hackathons, conferences and your involvement in the community.
• Full relocation support for you and your family (if the case) to move to Amsterdam - one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe. We have fine-tuned this process by successfully relocating 300+ Technology professionals to Amsterdam in the last year alone!
• Headquarters located in one of the most dynamic cities in Europe: Amsterdam
• Performance-based company that offers 29 vacation days, career advancement, and lucrative compensation, including bonuses and stock potential
• Discount on Booking.com accommodations with the “Booking Deal” including other perks and benefits
• Company-sponsored family and social activities to help our employees become integrated with each other and Dutch culture
• Diverse and creative colleagues from every corner of the world
• Generous relocation package, ensuring a smooth transition to working and living in Amsterdam
• With over 70 different nationalities within the technology department alone, you will be able to absorb new skills and grow your career in a multicultural environment.

We value Diversity of all types and in an open, dynamic workplace. This has been a pillar at Booking.com since day one, and something we continue to strongly believe in and build today.

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.