Software Engineer (For temp workers)

About Booking.com & Attractions

At Booking.com, our mission is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world. The Attractions vertical is part of the Trips business unit and focuses on tours, activities and things to do at destinations worldwide. We’re building a marketplace with the world’s broadest selection of bookable experiences, tightly integrated into the Connected Trip.

About the Attractions Connectivity team

The Attractions Connectivity team is a newly formed team, responsible for the technical interface between Booking.com and our connectivity partners and direct suppliers. Our goal is to accelerate the onboarding of new providers and give internal teams a consistent, provider‑agnostic platform to build on.

We own and evolve services such as connectivity integrations, imports for products and availability, and the tooling that helps commercial and operations teams bring new partners live reliably.

Role overview

We are looking for a Contract Software Engineer to help build and scale the new Attractions Connectivity team. You will:

Design and implement backend services and integrations in a modern Java/Kotlin stack

Contribute to connectivity flows for products, availability, reservations and webhooks

Help improve observability, reliability and developer experience for our services

Collaborate with product, commercial and operations partners to turn requirements into technical solutions

This is a role for an experienced engineer who enjoys working in cross‑functional teams, is comfortable in a fast‑moving environment, and is keen to grow by taking on meaningful ownership with support from more senior colleagues.

What you’ll do

Design & build connectivity services

- Break down requirements into clear technical tasks and implement them incrementally with code that is readable, tested and maintainable.

- Design, implement and evolve backend services and APIs in Java/Kotlin (e.g. Spring Boot or similar), running on Kubernetes with CI/CD.

- Integrate with third‑party provider APIs (typically REST/JSON), handling authentication, error scenarios and data mapping.

- Implement and extend connectors, configuration, and internal APIs that reduce the engineering effort of adding and maintaining providers.

- Work with existing data models for provider, product and availability information, and contribute improvements that support both scale and flexibility.

Support reliability & operations

- Instrument services with logging, metrics and alerting (e.g. Grafana, alerting tools, tracing) and use these to understand and improve system behaviour.

- Participate with in-hours on call leading incident diagnosis and driving follow‑up improvements and op docs.

- Contribute to resilience of integrations through idempotency, retries, sensible timeouts and graceful degradation patterns.

Collaborate

- Work closely with commercial, operations and other engineering teams to understand the end‑to‑end provider onboarding process.

- Take part in design discussions, code reviews and knowledge‑sharing sessions, learning from more senior engineers and helping uplift peers where you can.

- Work with teams both within and outside Booking to integrate services and debug issues that cross team boundaries.

What you’ll bring

Essential experience

- Solid backend engineering experience (typically 3+ years) building and operating production services in Java or Kotlin.

- Experience designing and consuming HTTP/REST APIs and integrating with external systems.

- Practical experience with distributed systems concerns such as retries, timeouts, idempotency and handling partial failures.

- Experience with cloud‑native development and deployment (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines; AWS or similar cloud).

- Good working knowledge of relational databases (e.g. MySQL) and at least one of: Kafka, another message queue, or an event‑driven architecture.

- Comfort with observability tooling (logs, metrics, dashboards, alerts) and using it to troubleshoot and improve services.

- Ability to work effectively in a cross‑functional team, collaborating with product managers, engineering managers and non‑engineering stakeholders.

- Clear, concise communication in English, written and spoken.

Nice to have

- Experience with connectivity or integrations in travel, ticketing or other marketplace domains (e.g. OTA, attractions, tours & activities, payments).

- Familiarity with attractions‑specific standards (e.g. OCTO) or similar vertical API standards.

- Experience working in a “startup‑style” or early‑stage team within a larger organisation (helping to improve ways of working and tooling over time).

- Experience building internal tooling or portals that sit on top of backend services (no need to be a pure frontend specialist).

If you’re a backend engineer who enjoys working on integrations, cares about reliability, and wants to contribute to shaping a new team in Attractions Connectivity, we’d be happy to hear from you.