Job Description

Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG) is the world leader in online travel and related services, provided to customers and partners in over 220 countries and territories through six primary consumer-facing brands - Booking.com, KAYAK, Priceline, Agoda.com, Rentalcars.com, and OpenTable. The mission of Booking Holdings is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world. During 2019, the Company had consolidated revenues and net income of $15.1 billion and $4.9 billion, respectively, and a current market value of approximately $90 billion. Booking Holdings Bangalore is a Center of Excellence based in Bangalore, India and a legal entity of Booking Holdings Inc. The Center was created to support the increasing business demands of the Booking Holdings Brands. The Center of Excellence provides access to specialized and highly skilled talent, leading industry best practices, and collaboration opportunities across all of the Booking Holdings brands and business units.

Job Overview

The core premise for SRE lies in treating operations as a software problem where operations are concerned with addressing availability, scalability, latency and efficiency for Booking.com’s systems & services. At its core the SRE is tasked with engineering efforts to solve complex problems, requiring a strong aptitude to develop software systems that will minimize (i.e. through automation) human labor and increase system & service reliability. A Booking Reliability Engineering team has full vertical ownership of a system, from the server configuration up to the application interfaces. This enables the team to have full control on a service, and avoid situations where different teams own different areas of a system and some parts fall between the cracks. SRE can wear several hats; at times an SRE might be part of the product development effort himself and other times will act as a consultant to support and advise a product development team to implement the Booking Reliability Engineering best practices. As systems & services grow in size and complexity so too does the operational overhead. It is a fundamental principle of SRE to break this relationship between operational toil, system size and complexity. This also requires the team to limit operations work enforcing engineering development efforts that is at the heart of Booking Reliability Engineering. Ultimately the fundamental software engineering skills coupled with strong systems and networking knowledge will guide the SRE to create more reliable systems & services that are highly available, which scales with growth and that is efficient and latency sensitive. A Senior SRE has the additional responsibilities of fostering an active and thriving SRE community, leading the community by example of being an advocate of engineering, reliability and security best practices.
What you’ll be doing: Software Systems Design

• Create software that will address availability, scalability, latency, and efficiency for Bookings’ systems/services
• Have a product-based mindset that takes both customer and future roadmap plans into account. Development efforts are focussed on solving for a general case in tech or related subsystem of responsibility while not ruling out that tooling or product can be leveraged by other teams

Technical Incident Management

• Take ownership of how to procedurally deal with emergency situations. SRE should write the playbook on how to deal with a system/service degrading or even a full outage
• Conduct post-mortem meetings (RFOs) to ensure learnings are applied and shared in case of incidents
• Take part in our incident management program by participating in on-call rotation.
• Be available to provide expertise and feedback for our service health program

Automation and Toil Reduction

• Build automation and application orchestration to prevent recurrent problems and to reduce human labor

Monitoring and Alerting Improvements

• Implement monitoring and alerting. This might not always be writing the software itself but could also be to create the best practices around how to monitor and alert for a system/service
• Engage in service capacity planning and demand forecasting, software performance analysis and system tuning

Architectural Guidance

• Maintain holistic knowledge and understanding of a system/service instead of only knowing some fraction of the problem space
• Create, document and implement Booking Reliability Engineering best practices.
• Collaborate with other teams and tech POs to support them in building reliable and scalable systems/services for their users and stakeholders
• Influence the business and tech colleagues to adapt engineering, reliability and security best practices

Community Involvement

• Take an active part in educating and skilling up members of our engineering community

What you’ll bring:

• Master degree
• Around 5 - 8 years of experience in a similar role
• Technical knowledge and skills
  • Proficiency in the core skills of a software developer: coding, large-scale software design & scaling, complexity analysis, algorithms, data structures, design patterns
  • Deep understanding of Unix/Linux systems internals and networking; this includes topics like: kernel, shell and client-server protocols
  • Proficiency in Unix/Linux system administration
  • Networking: significant knowledge and understanding of network theory, such as different protocols (TCP/IP, UDP, ICMP, etc), MAC addresses, IP packets, DNS, OSI layers, and load balancing)
  • Extensive on design, configuration and implementation for a system/service in a large scale production environment (systems engineering and architectural skills)
  • Eagerness to keep up with latest developments in technology
  • Connection with the worldwide SRE community
  • Exhibit the following behaviours: be curious; be data driven; have a systematic problem solving approach; constantly aiming to improve systems/services
  • Architectural Guidance
    • Advise product teams towards a technical solution that meets the functional, nonfunctional & architectural requirements by challenging the rationale for an application design and providing context in the wider architectural landscape
    • Set a clear direction for a technical capability by evaluating and aligning the target architecture improvements, reframing architectural designs and decisions for varied stakeholder
    • Critical Thinking
      • Find solutions to difficult or complex issues by applying different skills and techniques like analytical thinking, lateral thinking, and logical reasoning
      • Constructively improve existing ideas, plans and solutions by reviewing them in a critical yet constructive manner, initiating concrete improvements and articulating their rationale
      • Continuous Quality and Process Improvement
      • Identify opportunities for process, system and/or structural improvements, by applying an understanding of process flows and the methods that can be used to boost effectiveness and efficiency
      • End to End System Ownership
        • Own a service end to end by actively monitoring application health and performance, setting and monitoring relevant metrics and act accordingly when violated and guide more junior members of the team in this topic.
        • Reduce business continuity risks and bus factor by applying state-of-the-art practices and tools, and writing the appropriate documentation such as runbooks and OpDocs and guide more junior members of the team in this topic.
        • Reduce risk and obtain customer feedback by using continuous delivery and experimentation frameworks and guide more junior members of the team in this topic.
        • Independently manage an application or service by working through deployment and operations in production and guide more junior members of the team in this topic.
        • Effective Communication
          • Deliver clear, well-structured, and meaningful information to a target audience by using suitable communication mediums and language tailored to the audience
          • Achieve mutually agreeable solutions by staying adaptable, communicating ideas in clear coherent language and practising active listening
          • Ask relevant (follow-up) questions to properly engage with the speaker and really understand what they are saying, by applying listening and reflection techniques

About BKNG Booking Holdings is the world leader in online travel & related services. Our teams work around the clock to build and improve the technology that empowers people to more freely travel across borders, time zones, languages and cultures. At Booking Holdings, we make it easier for everyone to experience the world every day through seamless technology powered by our six major brands:

• Booking.com
• KAYAK
• priceline
• agoda
• Rentalcars.com
• OpenTable

Through the Booking Holdings brands, we help our customers reach all corners of the earth. Our ability to provide great service rests on how well we understand our diverse customer base, which is why having a diverse team is so important to us. We bring together employees from all walks of life and we are proud to provide the kind of inclusive environment that stimulates innovation, creativity and collaboration. EEO Statement: Booking Holdings is an equal opportunity employer in accordance with all applicable federal, state and local laws. We ensure equal employment opportunity to all employees and applicants without discrimination or harassment based on race, religious creed, color, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion, marital status, medical condition, disability, military service, pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions, or any other classification protected by federal, state, or local law. Booking Holdings also extends this policy to every phase of the employment process including, but not limited to, recruitment, selection, placement, transfer, training and development, position elimination, restructure, promotion, compensation, benefits, layoffs, termination, and all other conditions or privileges of employment. Booking Holdings and its Affiliated Companies are Equal Employment Opportunity employers and welcome all job seekers including individuals with disabilities and veterans with disabilities. If you have a disability and believe you need reasonable accommodation in order to search for a job opening or apply for a position, please email reasonableaccommodation@bookingholdings.com with your request. M/F/V/D/SO
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 open position at Booking.com.