Senior Software Engineer - Policy Platform

About us: At Booking.com, data drives our decisions. Technology is at our core. And innovation is everywhere. But our company is more than datasets, lines of code or A/B tests. We're the thrill of the first night in a new place. The excitement of the next morning. The friends you encounter. The journeys you take. The sights you see. And the memories you make. Through our products, partners and people, we make it easier for everyone to experience the world

About the team: Booking.com (USA), Inc, one of the support companies in the United States, is seeking a full time Senior Software Engineer in Washington, DC for the Policy Platform team of the Data and Machine Learning department. The teams in our track engineer the automation behind Booking's Data Governance and Compliance ecosystem. We build scalable solutions to discover and classify assets (including ML/AI), enforce data protection policies, and provide Legal and Compliance stakeholders with real-time visibility into the company's risk posture.

Role Description: As a Senior Software Engineer and technical leader, you will architect the foundational infrastructure for our data ecosystem, replacing manual stewardship with high-performance Policy-as-Code solutions. This role sits at the intersection of backend engineering and global governance, challenging you to build a scalable automation engine capable of detecting risks and enforcing protection standards across the enterprise in real-time. You will serve as a primary bridge between multidisciplinary stakeholders and the engineering organization, translating complex privacy requirements into production-grade software. Your mission is to ensure our data platform scales responsibly by engineering the intelligent tools that transform abstract policy into executable, automated code.

• Lead Technical Execution: Combine hands-on coding with ownership of impactful projects while supporting and elevating other team members.
• Drive Business Impact: Solve complex business problems, work cross-functionally, and lead initiatives to improve development processes and unlock new opportunities.
• Architect High-Scale Systems: Design and maintain low-latency services that guarantee performance even when traffic scales to hundreds of thousands of requests per second.
• Ensure Reliability & Quality: Maintain critical system uptime, troubleshoot effectively, profile production applications for bottlenecks, and lead incident management.

• Take initiative to address the larger technical needs of the product you work on and always keep the customer at the center of everything you do.
• Drive successful technical and business-related initiatives that improve productivity, performance, and quality.
  Possess a 'can do' attitude, acting proactively to address technical needs rather than reacting to them.
• Act as a humble thought leader who leads by example, gaining respect through actions rather than title.
• Advocate for a collaborative working environment-turning "my ideas" into "our ideas."
• Proactively share knowledge, mentor, and coach team members to help colleagues grow.
• Contribute to the growth of Booking.com through interviewing, on-boarding, or other recruitment efforts.
• Represent Booking.com values, both within the company and in the external community.

• Engineering Foundation: 5+ years of experience as a Software Engineer with strong programming skills in at least two server-side languages; Java, Kotlin, Python and NodeJS specific knowledge is an advantage.
• Strategic Data Governance: Expertise in implementing and enforcing governance frameworks (data catalogs, lineage, GDPR/CCPA) at an organizational level, shifting focus from simple compliance to architectural integrity and security.
• Advanced System Architecture: Proven track record of architecting complex, large-scale distributed systems. You define architectural standards and guide teams in designing observable, reliable systems capable of processing high-volume metadata across diverse assets.
• Technical Leadership: Proven experience in owning and leading technical projects, with the ability to partner with non-technical leadership (Legal, Risk) to influence strategy, negotiate complex requirements, and drive alignment on technical solutions.
• Operational Excellence: Demonstrated ability to keep critical systems up and running, with a strong grasp of reliability, troubleshooting, and incident management.
• Business Acumen: Ability to understand the business deeply, grasp and explain complex concepts, and make pragmatic technical decisions.

• Medical, life, and disability insurance
• Annual paid time off and generous paid leave scheme including: parent, grandparent, bereavement, sick, and care leave.
• Industry leading product discounts for yourself, friends, and family, including automatic Genius Level 3 status.
• Free access to online learning platforms, mentorship programs, and a complimentary Headspace membership.
• Collaborative, friendly and diverse culture.
• Referral Program.
• This role does come with relocation assistance.
• This role does not come with visa assistance.
• For Washington, DC this role will have a salary range of: $218,100 - $243,200.
• Additional Annual or Quarterly bonus potential (role dependent).
• Please note that while our philosophy is the same in every location, benefits may differ by office/country.

• Let's go places together: How we Hire.
• This role does come with relocation assistance.
• This role does not come with visa assistance.