Senior Software Engineer I

bookingholdings

Bangalore 7 Years Exp Posted 2h ago

Technical leadership

Own and drive multi-quarter technical initiatives in PBA - from problem framing through architecture, RFCs, and execution
Write and present RFCs at the Flights architecture forum; get cross-team alignment on direction and dependencies
Be the senior backend code reviewer for the team - set the bar for code quality, testing, and design

Hands-on engineering

Design and build backend services on the Post-Book stack (Java, Kafka, MySQL/Cassandra, gRPC)
Integrate with vendors and aggregators (e.g.,suppliers, GenAI Studio, C360 events) - own the vendor relationship, technical design, and contract
Build for scale: services run at millions of bookings/month with strict SLOs on latency and reliability

Service health & reliability

Own SLOs for PBA backend services - monitor alerts, drive incident follow-up, and close the loop on reliability gaps
Participate in the on-call rotation and lead incident reviews

Roadmap & planning

Translate yearly objectives into epics, sprint-ready tickets, and a multi-quarter technical roadmap
Partner with PM, UX, data, and platform teams to sequence work against dependencies (notably ETG, Order Service, and platform changes)

People & culture

Mentor SE1/SE2 engineers - pair on RFCs, system design, and code review
Run engineering rituals (architecture deep-dives, tech-debt grooming, RFC reviews)
Contribute to hiring - interview panels for SSE and SE2 roles

What you bring

Experience

7+ years of backend software engineering experience, with at least 2+ years operating at a senior level (E5/G-equivalent or above)
Track record of owning multi-quarter technical initiatives end-to-end - problem framing, RFC, architecture, execution, rollout
Experience leading vendor or third-party integrations from technical scoping through production

Engineering depth

Strong backend fundamentals - distributed systems, microservices, API design, async/event-driven architectures
Production experience with Java (or another JVM language); comfortable in a polyglot stack
Data layer experience - relational (MySQL/Postgres) and NoSQL (Cassandra/DynamoDB); schema design, query optimization, consistency trade-offs
Event streaming - Kafka or equivalent; comfortable designing event-driven flows and dealing with at-least-once semantics
Reliability practices - SLOs, observability (Grafana/Prometheus), incident management, capacity planning

System design

Can architect a system from first principles for non-trivial scale - design for millions of users, define data models, reason about consistency vs. availability, plan for failure modes
Can communicate design clearly in writing (RFCs) and in forums

Senior behaviors

Nice to have (preference)

Flights domain background - accelerates ramp on a domain with significant supplier, fare-rule, and post-booking complexity
Experience with GenAI / LLM-backed product integrations
Familiarity with iOS/Android app integration patterns (the team is mobile-heavy)
- Exposure to Kubernetes, gRPC/Protobuf, distributed tracing