Engineering Manager - Android (For temp workers)

About the department

This role is based in Manchester within Connected Trip Search in the Marketplace Business Unit. The Conversational Search Experience team works with colleagues across Manchester, Amsterdam, and other locations to deliver customer-facing search experiences.

The team is multidisciplinary and includes Android, iOS, backend, and full-stack engineers, as well as Product, Design, UX, data, and other specialist partners. Together, the team explores and delivers conversational and search experiences that help customers find relevant travel options more naturally and effectively.

Role overview

As Engineering Manager, you will lead, coach, and develop a multidisciplinary engineering team responsible for building and operating customer-facing products in Connected Trip Search.

Your primary responsibility will be to create the conditions for the team to do its best work: providing clarity, improving delivery, growing engineers, managing risks, and building strong relationships with Product, Design, and engineering partners.

You will also bring strong Android engineering experience to the team. You will not be expected to be the only Android specialist or to write production code every day. However, you should be able to contribute to Android-specific parts of the product when needed, guide Android technical decisions, review designs and code, help troubleshoot production issues, and coach engineers on platform-specific trade-offs.

You will balance near-term delivery with long-term technical health across Android, iOS, backend, and full-stack components. You will help the team build reliable, maintainable software and use customer feedback, experimentation, and production data to improve the product continuously.

Role qualifications and requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 5+ years of hands-on professional software engineering experience, including significant experience building and shipping Android applications.

• Experience managing, leading, or coaching software engineering teams, ideally in a product-led environment.

• Strong practical knowledge of Android development, including Kotlin and the Android platform ecosystem.

• Experience with modern Android architecture and development practices, such as Jetpack, Compose and/or Views, modularisation, asynchronous programming, and reusable component design.

• A good understanding of mobile testing, CI/CD, release management, feature flags, phased rollouts, crash and ANR monitoring, and production debugging.

• Experience making technical trade-offs across application architecture, networking, caching, performance, device compatibility, accessibility, and maintainability.

• Ability to contribute directly to Android code or technical investigations when the team needs additional support.

• Ability to work effectively with iOS, backend, full-stack, Product, Design, UX, data, infrastructure, security, and other specialist partners.

• Experience coaching engineers, supporting career development, giving actionable feedback, and building healthy, inclusive teams.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to adapt technical information to different audiences.

• A pragmatic approach to balancing customer impact, delivery goals, technical quality, and operational risk.

Key responsibilities and duties

Managing the team

• Provide clear direction, priorities, and context so engineers understand what they are building and why.

• Own delivery planning, roadmap progress, resourcing, dependencies, risks, and blockers.

• Create effective ways of working across Android, iOS, backend, and full-stack engineering.

• Track team health and delivery signals, identify issues early, and resolve or escalate them appropriately.

• Communicate progress, risks, dependencies, and decisions clearly to stakeholders.

• Participate in recruitment and headcount planning. Booking.com engineering teams generally consist of 5–8 engineers, a Product Manager, and may include virtual roles such as UX designers and testers. An Engineering Manager may be responsible for 1–3 teams.

Coaching and mentoring

• Coach engineers at different levels through regular 1:1s, feedback, mentoring, and development opportunities.

• Help engineers grow their technical influence and product ownership.

• Support senior Android engineers in developing architectural leadership and cross-team influence.

• Encourage knowledge sharing across Android, iOS, backend, and full-stack engineering.

• Build an environment with clear expectations, psychological safety, autonomy, and accountability.

Android technical leadership

• Provide technical guidance for Android-specific product capabilities and platform integrations.

• Review or challenge Android architecture, implementation approaches, and technical designs.

• Guide decisions involving Kotlin, Jetpack, Compose and/or Views, modularisation, concurrency, networking, caching, testing, and dependency management.

• Contribute to Android code, prototypes, debugging, or technical investigations when this will help the team deliver or resolve an important issue.

• Help engineers choose solutions that are appropriate for the customer, product, platform, and operational context rather than prescribing one pattern universally.

• Represent Android engineering in cross-team discussions and share relevant practices beyond the immediate team.

End-to-end product and system ownership

• Ensure the team owns its software throughout the lifecycle: discovery, design, implementation, release, operation, and continuous improvement.

• Monitor Android application health and performance using appropriate signals such as crashes, ANRs, startup time, responsiveness, rendering performance, network behaviour, and customer feedback.

• Establish clear ownership for Android modules, shared libraries, services, build pipelines, and operational responsibilities.

• Reduce business continuity risk and bus factor through documentation, runbooks, knowledge sharing, and sustainable on-call practices.

• Use continuous delivery, feature flags, experimentation, and phased rollouts to reduce risk and learn from customer behaviour.

• Balance investment in new capabilities with maintenance, platform evolution, technical debt, and reliability improvements.

• Mobile quality and performance

• Make Android quality and performance first-class product concerns.

• Ensure experiences work effectively across relevant devices, operating-system versions, screen sizes, and network conditions.

• Improve testing strategies across unit, UI, integration, regression, and end-to-end testing where appropriate.

• Promote accessibility, security, privacy, compliance, and data protection in Android product delivery.

• Use profiling, observability, crash reporting, analytics, and production feedback to drive measurable improvements.

• Partner with iOS and backend engineers to provide consistent and reliable cross-platform experiences.

Technical incident management

• Help the team mitigate live production issues and minimise customer impact within agreed service levels.

• Support Android-specific diagnosis using tools such as logs, traces, crash reports, profiling tools, emulators, and physical devices.

• Lead or support root-cause analysis and ensure incidents result in lasting improvements.

• Contribute to postmortems, operational documentation, and follow-up actions.

  
  

• Participate in an on-call rotation where required by the team’s operational model.

  
  

• Building software applications

  
  

• Ensure the team builds readable, reusable, secure, and maintainable software using appropriate languages, frameworks, libraries, and development practices.

  
  

• Maintain a high standard of engineering quality through code review, automated testing, documentation, and continuous integration.

  
  

• Help the team deliver Android-specific product experiences while maintaining healthy collaboration with iOS, backend, and full-stack engineers.

  
  

• Encourage engineers to validate assumptions, seek customer feedback, and use experimentation where appropriate.

Architectural guidance

• Advise Product and engineering stakeholders on solutions that meet functional, non-functional, and architectural requirements.

  
  

• Set direction for technical capabilities and target architecture within the team’s area of ownership.

  
  

• Make trade-offs visible and explain architectural decisions to both technical and non-technical audiences.

  
  

• Identify opportunities to simplify systems, improve maintainability, and reduce unnecessary coupling between mobile and backend components.

Critical thinking and continuous improvement

• Identify patterns and underlying issues in complex technical, product, and organisational situations.

  
  

• Evaluate proposals objectively, compare alternatives, and articulate the rationale behind decisions.

  
  

• Improve processes, standards, developer experience, release practices, and team structures where they enable better outcomes.

  
  

• Use delivery data, operational signals, customer feedback, and experimentation results to inform priorities.

Effective communication

Communicate clearly, proactively, and concisely with engineers, Product, Design, leadership, and other stakeholders.

Create alignment around goals, priorities, risks, trade-offs, decisions, and dependencies.

Practise active listening and ask relevant follow-up questions to understand different perspectives.

Adapt communication style and level of technical detail to the audience.

Managing people

• Inspire, grow, and develop individuals through regular feedback, development planning, coaching, and stretch opportunities.

• Recognise strong performance and address underperformance fairly, promptly, and constructively.

• Collaborate with HR and relevant leaders on performance, wellbeing, and people processes.

• This is a contract role and will initially involve managing a team that includes contractors. While you may not be responsible for their long-term career development within the Booking.com framework, you will still be expected to motivate, support, engage, and effectively lead all team members.

• Equal opportunity statement

Booking.com is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and 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 create an environment that allows everyone to thrive.