Lead Software Engineer

Powering the agentic revolution in travel. Sabre is an AI-native technology leader, backed by one of the world’s largest travel data clouds. Built on an open, modular, cloud-native architecture, Sabre serves as the backbone for both established leaders and bold, new disruptors, guiding them to the next age of travel retailing through intelligent, connected, and personalized experiences. With AI at its core and operating at unparalleled scale, Sabre transforms insights into innovation, empowering airlines, hoteliers, agencies and other partners to retail, distribute and fulfill travel worldwide.

Job Summary

We are looking for an experienced Lead Software Engineer to lead the design and development of scalable, secure, and highly available enterprise applications and middleware services and airline domain experience

The ideal candidate will have strong hands-on expertise in Java, Spring Boot, Microservices, REST APIs, Middleware/Integration technologies, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The role requires a combination of technical leadership, architecture/design ownership, hands-on development, troubleshooting, and mentoring.

The engineer will work closely with architects, product owners, engineering teams, DevOps/SRE, and dependent systems to deliver reliable cloud-native solutions.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Lead technical design and implementation of Java/Spring Boot-based microservices and middleware applications.
• Translate business and functional requirements into scalable technical solutions using AI
• Define service boundaries, API contracts, integration patterns, and application architecture.
• Conduct design and code reviews and establish engineering best practices.
• Evaluate technical trade-offs around scalability, performance, resiliency, maintainability, and cost.
• Provide technical direction to engineers and mentor junior and mid-level developers.
• Drive technical discussions across dependent application and platform teams.

Java & Microservices AI Development

• Design and develop production-grade applications using Java 17/21, Spring Boot, Spring Framework, and Spring Cloud.
• Build and maintain RESTful APIs and event-driven services.
• Implement microservice patterns including:
  • API Gateway
  • Circuit Breaker
  • Retry/Timeout
  • Service Discovery
  • Distributed configuration
  • Event-driven architecture
  • Idempotency
  • Caching
  • Distributed tracing
• Apply appropriate design patterns and SOLID principles.
• Develop effective unit, integration, component, and contract tests using tools such as JUnit, Mockito, WireMock, and Testcontainers.

Middleware & Integration

• Design integrations between enterprise applications using REST, JSON, XML, messaging, and event-driven patterns.
• Develop middleware services that transform, route, validate, and orchestrate requests across multiple systems.
• Work with technologies such as Kafka, Pub/Sub, JMS, API gateways, and service-to-service integrations.
• Handle high-volume synchronous and asynchronous transaction flows.
• Design appropriate error handling, retry, dead-letter, timeout, and recovery mechanisms.
• Troubleshoot complex issues across multiple applications and integration layers.

GCP & Cloud-Native Engineering

• Design and deploy services on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Hands-on experience with relevant GCP services such as:
  • Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
  • Cloud Run
  • Pub/Sub
  • Cloud Storage
  • Cloud SQL
  • Secret Manager
  • IAM
  • Cloud Logging and Monitoring
• Build containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes.
• Implement secure workload identity, secrets management, and IAM-based access control.
• Design applications considering high availability, scalability, disaster recovery, and observability.

DevOps, CI/CD & Observability

• Work with CI/CD pipelines using technologies such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or equivalent.
• Implement automated build, test, security scanning, and deployment pipelines.
• Work with Infrastructure-as-Code solutions such as Terraform.
• Establish monitoring and observability using technologies such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or GCP Cloud Monitoring.
• Diagnose production problems using logs, metrics, traces, thread dumps, heap analysis, and application performance data.

Engineering Quality & Security

• Ensure applications meet enterprise security and coding standards.
• Apply secure coding practices for APIs and microservices.
• Implement authentication and authorization using technologies such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWT, and mTLS.
• Identify performance bottlenecks and drive application optimization.
• Ensure adequate automated test coverage and quality gates.
• Participate in production incident analysis and root-cause analysis.

Experience

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, with substantial hands-on Java development.
• 4+ years working with Spring Boot and microservices architectures.
• Strong experience designing and developing enterprise middleware/integration solutions.
• Practical experience delivering applications on GCP or a comparable public-cloud platform, with hands-on GCP experience strongly preferred.
• Experience with distributed, high-volume, highly available systems.
• Prior experience functioning as a Technical Lead or Lead Engineer, including design/code reviews and mentoring.
• Experience taking services from design through development, testing, deployment, and production support.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience modernizing monolithic or legacy middleware applications into cloud-native microservices.
• Experience with API gateways and service mesh technologies such as Istio.
• Knowledge of asynchronous/event-driven architectures using Kafka or GCP Pub/Sub.
• Experience with performance engineering and JVM troubleshooting.
• Familiarity with 12-factor application principles and cloud-native application design.
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum engineering environments.
• GCP certification such as Professional Cloud Developer or Professional Cloud Architect is an advantage.

Leadership Expectations

The Lead Software Engineer should remain strongly hands-on, rather than functioning only as a people or project lead. A reasonable expectation for the role is roughly 80% technical design/coding/review and 20% technical leadership, mentoring, cross-team coordination, and delivery ownership, depending on project phase.

The successful candidate should be able to:

• Own a complex service or integration end-to-end.
• Break large requirements into implementable technical components.
• Guide engineers through complex design and production issues.
• Challenge designs constructively and propose practical alternatives.
• Communicate architectural decisions clearly to both engineering and non-engineering stakeholders.
• Drive technical issues to closure across multiple teams.

We will give careful consideration to your application and review your details against the position criteria. You will receive separate notification as your application progresses.

Please note that only candidates who meet the minimum criteria for the role will proceed in the selection process.

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