Backend Software Engineer 2 - Pipeline

Booking Holdings Romania is a Center of Excellence based in Bucharest, Romania and was created to support the increasing business demands of the Booking Holdings Brands. The Center of Excellence provides access to specialized and highly skilled talent, leading industry best practices, and collaboration opportunities across all of our Brands.

As part of our Booking Holdings Romania team, you will have the opportunity to be a part of the world’s leading provider of online travel, with a mission of making it easier for everyone to experience the world through five-primary consumer facing brands: Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, KAYAK and OpenTable.

Role description

As a Backend Software Engineer at our Bucharest Center of Excellence, you will design, build, and scale resilient software services that power our global platforms and internal ecosystems. You will work within an autonomous engineering team to solve complex technical challenges, applying modern software development practices to deliver high-performance, fault-tolerant solutions. Your work will focus on core backend systems, robust APIs, data integrity, and distributed architecture while collaborating closely with cross-functional partners across the organization.

This role provides a hybrid way of working with an onsite presence of 2 days/week.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties

Building Software Applications

• Design, build, and maintain robust, high-performance, and scalable backend applications and public/internal APIs using modern server-side technologies.
• Write clean, readable, reusable, and well-tested code by applying standard architectural and design patterns.
• Ensure overall software quality by implementing comprehensive automated testing strategies (unit, integration, and end-to-end).
• Maintain high standards for data security, system integrity, and code quality in line with company best practices.

End-to-End System Ownership

• Own services throughout their full lifecycle, from technical design and implementation to deployment, operational support, and ongoing maintenance.
• Proactively monitor application performance and health, establishing key metrics, alarms, and dashboards to ensure platform stability.
• Reduce operational risk and support business continuity through clear technical documentation, runbooks, and automated deployment pipelines.

Technical Incident Management & Reliability

• Address, troubleshoot, and resolve production issues to mitigate customer and platform impact within established SLAs.
• Improve system reliability and performance by conducting blameless postmortems and performing root-cause analysis to deliver long-term solutions.

Architecture & Systems Design

• Evaluate technical trade-offs, emerging technologies, business requirements, and operational costs to design sustainable software architectures.
• Contribute to architectural discussions and roadmaps, ensuring that new services integrate seamlessly into the broader distributed ecosystem.
• Build flexible, future-proof designs capable of scaling to support growing business demands.

Continuous Improvement & Collaboration

• Identify opportunities for technical, operational, and process enhancements to drive developer productivity and system efficiency.
• Communicate technical concepts, design decisions, and trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Actively participate in code reviews, technical sharing sessions, and team initiatives that foster continuous learning and engineering excellence.

Role Qualifications and Requirements

• 3+ years of professional software development experience focusing on backend systems: Java (preferably), Python or Go.
• Bachelor Degree in Computer Science or related field.
• Demonstrated experience in designing, building, and maintaining scalable RESTful APIs, microservices, and distributed systems.
• Solid experience working with relational or non-relational databases (such as MySQL, PostgreSQL).
• Working knowledge of containerization tools (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) and modern CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitLab CI).
• Experience with modern engineering best practices, including automated testing (TDD), version control (Git), and observability/monitoring tools.
• Analytical mindset with proven problem-solving skills and the ability to operate effectively within complex systems.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with an ability to collaborate across functional disciplines.
• Preferred: Experience with event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ), distributed caching (e.g., Redis), cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS), or large-scale, high-throughput systems.

Benefits & Perks

• Contributing to a high scale, complex, world renowned product and seeing real-time impact of your work on millions of travelers worldwide
• Working in a fast-paced and performance driven culture
• Technical, behavioral and interpersonal competence advancement via on-the-job opportunities, experimental projects, hackathons, conferences and active community participation
• Competitive compensation and benefits package 
• Vast amounts of data to validate your ideas and the opportunity to experiment with real users

Booking Holdings 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, color, 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.