Senior Director Engineering - Accommodations Traveler

As a Senior Director Engineering - Accommodations Traveler, you are responsible for leading the areas focused on the Traveler Experience and Traveler Platform within the Accommodations Business Unit (ABU).

Your focus will be on:

• Leading the Accommodation Traveler technology organisation and building and running systems and capabilities.
• Partnering with Product, planning and delivering to meet our ABU objectives
• Collaborating with the other Business Units and in particular Trips, Marketplace and Central Tech to help build the Connected Trip
• First-hand focus on exploring Generative AI opportunities in both building new Product capabilities as well as accelerating software engineering.

Desired Outcomes:

• Deliver on our objectives together with Product counterpart; lead an effective, efficient and engaged engineering organisation that builds with high velocity and quality.
• Help lead the broader ABU Engineering & Data department as part of ABU Tech LT; be the voice of leadership towards the data and engineering community.
• Evolve and execute our technology strategy to transform a legacy environment, improving scalability, agility, and efficiency, and ensuring future-proofing.
• Ensure the technology strategy is clearly communicated and understood across the organization, and drive adoption and execution.
• Drive alignment and buy-in from both tech and non-tech stakeholders by effectively influencing and collaborating at all levels.
• Deploy data, machine learning and AI solutions that measurably enhance the Traveler experience and drive business impact.

Responsibilities:

In your role you will lead the Senior Technology teams for Traveler space, making a marked contribution in defining the direction of new products, processes or operational plans in line with the Booking.com vision and strategy.

Your role focuses on delivery of our objectives, at pace and with high quality (today) and making sure that the organisation is set up for success through building a fantastic team, excellent ways of working and great technology (tomorrow).

The How:

A servant leader: You can hold your own in a technical argument, but you know getting out of the way is often the best option. You get things done via influence not authority. You unlock the creativity of your team and inspire them to build the best for our customers.

A valued partner: You work closely with your product and commercial counterparts to ensure we are always working towards what's most important for our Travelers and to achieve high business impact.

A role model: You need to be able to live the Booking.com values and role model the mindsets. Should be a thought partner on how to evolve our culture to be successful in the future.

People & Function Leadership

• Lead, inspire and motivate your Engineering function through leading by example and setting expectations around what success looks like, giving ownership and providing clarity
• Managing Directors and (Senior) Managers as well as top technical talent, such as Principals.
• Communicate strategy in an effective and compelling manner to multiple teams and relevant stakeholders
• Foster inclusion by holding self and others accountable to drive people centric initiatives that enable workforce diversity
• Experience with organisational design, strategy and budget to ensure we are set up to deliver on our strategic agenda
• Partner in and outside of our Business unit to lead and shape the people agenda across Booking.com, specifically for the Software Engineering craft
• Create a learning environment by coaching, two-way feedback, helping people extract and share personal learnings, and support teams to constantly adapt
• Build a world class team through nurturing, attracting, and retaining tech talent from around the world
• Empower your teams to do their best work at Booking.com
• Be curious, learn, iterate and shape our culture

Technology, Craft & Delivery Leadership

• Help evolve our long-term technology plans and make sure they align with the overall focus of the business
• Lead, influence and own delivery within your function including department goals
• Partner with other functions and business units to deliver on our strategic agenda
• Maintain focus on the end goal, minimise risk and remove roadblocks for our strategic agenda
• Ensure clear and effective communication at all levels: proactively keep all stakeholders informed of what's happening, upcoming changes, projects, issues and risks
• Drive engineering mastery across Booking.com including shaping ways of working
• Own Technology-wide topics and help lead and grow the department
• Embed Agile ways of working and values within the organisation
• Identify problems and significantly improve, change or adapt existing methods and techniques drawing from personal experiences and feedback
• Drive a DevOps culture

Technology, Architecture & Product Strategy

• Shape, define and build new products, processes and operational plans in alignment with the commercial and financial needs of the business
• Lead, take ownership and shape the technology strategic objectives and roadmaps
• Be a strategic thought partner and influence senior stakeholders across the Accommodations and the broader business
• Make decisions in complex and ambiguous situations, and guide others in their decision making by recognizing and challenging assumptions, introducing relevant data and multiple perspectives
• Ensure that the Booking architecture principles and engineering practices are adhered to, and that there is direction and alignment for each product.
• Anticipate the need for changes based on context, and set renewed courses of action to engage teams and achieve goals, while striving to make the impact clear and understandable
• Drive innovation in your function
• Own the architecture across your function

Ideal Experience & Skills:

We hire the best and the brightest professionals, and we empower them to innovate. In the Accommodations Engineering you need to have:

• Extensive experience leading large technology organisations at scale; preferably large scale e-commerce sites or marketplace companies
• Deep understanding of technology and a proven track record of designing and building high quality web and mobile applications, especially high volume consumer facing applications
• Strong technology thought leadership to understand and solve the Business, Commercial, Customer and Partners needs; strong commercial awareness and keen interest in understanding the business
• Proven ability to partner with Product and Business leaders effectively
• Experience building technology shared services to support the wider organisation
• Expertise in leading and improving operational health; ability to understand the regulatory landscape and to lead towards compliance.
• Ability to leverage data and the latest AI technologies to improve the customer experience. A keen interest in AI developments and their applications in the engineering space.
• Experience building, shaping and leading a cross functional Engineering function or business unit at scale (150/200+ people)
• Experience with growing, coaching and managing teams of senior tech leaders
• Experience of leading Agile environments and driving Agile culture and ethos
• Experience of setting, leading and influencing both the Engineering and Business strategy to the medium and long-term
• Experience with cloud based technologies
• Experience in building a DevOps culture
• Excellent communication skills
• Strong commercial acumen
• Be able to deputise for the VP of Engineering

Pre-Employment Screening

If your application is successful, your personal data may be used for a pre-employment screening check by a third party as permitted by applicable law. Depending on the vacancy and applicable law, a pre-employment screening may include employment history, education and other information (such as media information) that may be necessary for determining your qualifications and suitability for the position.

Client-provided location(s): Amsterdam, Netherlands

Job ID: booking-26803

Employment Type: OTHER

Posted: 2025-12-04T18:36:29