Test Engineer (For temp workers)

Team Summary

This role sits in the Yielding team within Insurance Offer & Display group. The team of software engineers are based in Amsterdam and sits within the Insurance engineering organisation. The team’s mission is to maximise revenue by managing a balanced portfolio of free and paid Smart Flex, creating more flexibility for guests, guaranteed bookings for partners, and sustainable growth for Booking.com.

They are a platform/backend team with some customer-facing integration points. They own the eligibility, pricing, reallocation and payout side of SmartFlex product, plus related platform integrations.

The technologies that they work with includes Kubernetes, Kafka, MySQL, Java and Perl.

Team set-up

- Yielding sits in the Offer & Display area of Insurance and is primarily based in Amsterdam with the test team based in Manchester

Team ways of working

- Testing is expected to be embedded through the full software lifecycle, not treated as a final-step gate.

- The wider Test Engineering framework defines the craft as early and continuous testing, and expects test engineers to work collaboratively to build testable, performant and high-quality systems.

- In Yielding, engineers test changes end to end using KVMs, DQS and, where needed, MySQL, with clear validation across UI behaviour, views, Kafka events and other data checks.

- The team works with prepared test assets and controlled environments, including central test-hotel data, feature flags, pricing rules and evidence capture in Jira or test notes.

Team strengths and opportunities

Strengths

- Clear commercial and product mission around SmartFlex, with defined ownership in the Insurance organisation.

- Strong Defect Management strategy

Opportunities

- Ensuring the team understand the value of testing changes before releasing to production

- A growing team still dealing with the challenge of onboarding new members while continuing delivery and modernisation work.

- Improving tooling and data availability for easier set up of testing activities

- Further alignment is needed around system testing expectations, release and rollout readiness, and release auditing in the Yielding area.

- There is room to keep strengthening test evidence, risk assessment tracking and automation approaches such as contract testing where they add confidence and scalability.

Skills

Required

- Test advocacy: Able to advocate for the importance of carrying out testing in a non production environment and providing good level of confidence prior to release

- Software testability: Able to influence the team (or drive themselves) to build features and services in ways that are observable, controllable and easier to verify in isolation and in integrated flows.

- Critical thinking: Able to spot patterns, challenge weak assumptions and look how the team can adopt AI to accelerate the testing parts of the SDLC

- Continuous quality and process improvement: Able to improve ways of working, test evidence quality and being a strong voice for maintaining recently adopted practices (Refinement, recording test evidence and defect management approach)

- Effective communication: Able to communicate clearly with engineers, product managers and partner teams, tailoring depth and language to the audience

Desirable

- Test automation: Able to identify where automation adds value, contribute useful automated coverage, and improve feedback speed and reliability in pipelines and service-level checks.

- Non-functional testing: Able to consider reliability, performance, and operational risk where relevant to SmartFlex and Yielding changes.

What good looks like

A strong Test Engineer in Yielding improves confidence without becoming a bottleneck: they help the team ship SmartFlex changes safely, make complex flows easier to test, advocate for the consistent recording of test evidence, and steadily grow the team’s automation and quality practices in line with the company Quality Strategy