Software Engineer II (For independent contractors)

Please note, this is a 10-month assignment for freelancers.

The pay rate is 65-105 EUR/hour.

A Software Engineer II owns the end-to-end execution of technical elements in the Booking.com tech stack, products and processes. They are responsible for accurate estimation or forecasting the needed efforts, software design and implementation of complex technical solutions based on business requirements, testing and deployment up to production with non-disruptive way to our customers, monitoring of the services health.

We are developing the Core Messaging Platform that offers written conversational channels for actors to exchange the free-text messages and emails. The platform serves our travellers, accommodation partners and CS specialists and we are excited to start extending it to other types of participants as well, covering the arising need in Booking for conversational interfaces. Our platform processes more than 2 billion API requests per day, allowing our consumers to exchange more than 100 million messages per month. Key

Responsibilities

Building software applications:

• Is responsible to build software applications independently

• Is responsible to write readable and reusable code

• Is responsible for reviewing code written by peers to ensure code quality

• Is responsible to refactor and simplify code by introducing design patterns

• Is responsible to ensure the quality of the application by following best-matching testing techniques and methods that adhere to the test strategy.

• Is responsible to maintain data security, integrity and quality by effectively following company standards and best practices.

End to End System Ownership:

• Is responsible to own services end to end by actively monitoring application health and performance

• Is responsible to define, set and monitor relevant metrics, logs, requests traceability and act accordingly when violated

• Is responsible to independently manage an application or service by working through local build, environments transition, deployment and operations in production. Technical Incident Management

• Is responsible to address and resolve production issues by mitigating the customer impact within SLA

• Is responsible to improve the overall reliability of systems by producing long term solutions through root cause analysis Software Systems Design

• Is responsible to investigate and define the best-matching approach for system integration with the set of Booking technical components owned by different teams

• Is responsible to evaluate possible architecture solutions and design by taking into account business requirements, non-functional requirements, technology, timelines, available capacity etc

• Is responsible to describe the implications of changing an existing system or adding a new system to a specific area, by having a broad, high-level understanding of the infrastructure and architecture of our systems Continuous Quality and Process Improvement

• Is responsible to identify opportunities for process, system and structural improvements by examining and evaluating current process flows, methods and standards.

• Is responsible to design and implement relevant improvements by defining adapted/new process flows, standards, and practices that enable business performance.

Effective Communication

• Is responsible to deliver clear, well-structured, and meaningful information to a target audience by using suitable communication mediums and language tailored to the audience

• Is responsible to achieve mutually agreeable solutions by staying adaptable, communicating ideas in clear coherent language and practicing active listening

Requirements of special knowledge/skills

• Strong programming skills and experience with 2 server-side programming languages (Java is a must), coding standards

• SDLC best practices: source control management, code reviews, unit and integration tests, build pipelines, build and configuration tools, E2E tests

• Observability: logging, tracing, metrics. Building relevant dashboards to monitor service health, defining alerts

• REST API design and best practices: API versioning, online documentation, applying relevant HTTP methods, setting up clear request/response structure, API backward compatibility

• System design: architecture and system design patterns and best practices, system visualization and documentation

• Resilience and graceful degradation: retries, circuit breakers, fallbacks

• Building and managing container-based applications

• Integration techniques and trade offs: synchronous and asynchronous approaches

• Experience with legacy system integration and phased application integration

• Experience with AWS public cloud services

• Experience with streaming solutions

• Practical experience with DynamoDB is a big plus

Languages, systems, protocols and tools: Java, Git, Docker, Kubernetes, Maven, Terraform, Java server micro frameworks (Dropwizard, SpringBoot or others), REST, Swagger and interactive visualization systems (Prometheus, Graphite, Grafana or others), CICD tools (Harness, Jenkins or others), message queues (Kafka, Redis, AWS SQS or others), no-SQL databases (Cassandra, AWS DynamoDB or others), service mesh (Envoy or others), AWS services (Dynamo DB, Lambda, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, etc).