Senior Technical Program Manager - ITDR

About the team:

The ITDR (IT Disaster Recovery) team at Booking.com plays a key role within Technical Operations, dedicated to ensuring the company's operational resilience. This team designs, tests, and maintains disaster recovery protocols to safeguard organizational assets and services from unexpected disruptions. By driving cross-functional initiatives, managing risk, and advancing best practices in recovery planning, ITDR enables Booking.com to effectively respond to incidents and maintain business continuity. Their ongoing work strengthens compliance, improves preparedness, and supports scalable, secure IT solutions for the future.

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.

Role Overview

Senior TPMs must have a strong TPM background, with demonstrated experience leading large cross-organizational programs plus have a deep technical background in DevOps methodologies with an affinity in this particular role for ITDR Policy & Delivery plus Operational Excellence processes and associated enablers.

They must be able to thrive and succeed in an entrepreneurial environment, and not be hindered by ambiguity or competing priorities. This means not only being able to develop and drive high-level strategic initiatives, but also roll up your sleeves, dig in and help drive change.

Senior TPMs, anticipate bottlenecks, provide escalation management, anticipate and make tradeoffs, and balance customer and business needs versus technical constraints. An ability to take large, complex projects and break them down into manageable pieces, develop functional specifications, then deliver them in a successful and timely manner is expected. They should be entrepreneurial, innovative individuals who thrive on solving tough problems. Maturity, high judgment, negotiation skills, ability to influence, analytical talent, and leadership are essential to success in this role.

Experience working on ITDR programs with successful execution in complex, decentralized environments is required. Knowledge of the following is also required: product development, agile project management, Sites Reliability Engineering and/or ITIL operational excellence processes

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties

• Be the driving force that collaborates with business and technical teams across Booking to make sure your teams deliver world class solutions that are highly scalable, secure, and flexible - all the while maintaining a strong customer focus, including working with and influencing leadership and key teams to support and invest in ITDR
• Build and oversee technical programs with an inherent focus on resilience and recovery, making sure that what is built can also withstand unforeseen challenges, including End-to-End Recovery Capability Enhancement and Governance
• Interact with project sponsors, project stakeholders and multiple business and technical teams to define and deliver complex features.
• Anticipate bottlenecks, provide escalation management, anticipate and make tradeoffs, and balance the business needs versus technical constraints, with an understanding and ongoing management of technology dependency mapping aligned to customer and business needs
• Contributing to and supporting the delivery of the Global IT Disaster Recovery Roadmap.
• Plan and manage multiple parallel projects
• The ability to slice through ambiguity and drive clarity where confusion exists; leveraging technical expertise with strong business acumen
• Maximize resources for the greater good of the organization, identify inefficient processes or waste and redirect resources as necessary
• Identify, assess, track and mitigate issues and risks at multiple levels, including contributing to the development of organizational response plan templates, planning, setup, rollout, testing and maintenance of technical disaster recovery plans, and ensuring quality assurance of restore and response plans maintained by stakeholders
• Create, maintain and disseminate project information to stakeholders
• Presents at sub-department/department management reviews (MBRs, QP), which includes communication of project issues, status and plans in a concise, accurate, and professional manner
• Insatiable curiosity and ability to understand architectural and technical aspects of projects
• Support the technical implementation and ongoing update of resilience platforms and tools within your project scope, ensuring their readiness for use in disaster recovery and business continuity programs
• Expertise in identifying and managing technical operational risks, propose or obtain risk mitigation plans from risk owners.
• Ensure stakeholder alignment to ITDR Policy and Data Backup & Restore Policy
• Apply best practices to the software development lifecycle (SDLC) for projects based on experiences with a number of agile and blended approaches, as well effectively coordinating the implementations across teams using very different approaches, and driving continuous improvement for resilience programs by benchmarking industry best practices, deep-diving into data, processes, systems, and challenges, and ensuring alignment to relevant regulatory requirements like ISO 27031 and NIST.
• Build and maintain integrated project schedules that account for internal/external dependencies, differing SDLC approaches, numerous constraints and adequately factors in some contingency for some unplanned delays while still being aggressive.
• Act as point of contact for Tech ITDR, creating strong formal and informal networks with cross-functional partners to drive engagement and program viability
• Promote a culture of continuous improvement across all initiatives and areas

• Previous experience delivering technical programs is required. Understanding of technology (do not need to be a developer or programmer in previous experience, but must be comfortable with and able to communicate about tech specific topics)Strong analytical and quantitative skills; Data driven and results-oriented
• A proven track record of leading a visionary strategy to deliver global, company-wide platform services at enterprise large scales
• Strong customer focus and understanding of ITDR requirements being driven by what is critical to the organization / customers
• Experience working on ITDR programs with successful execution in complex, decentralized environments.