Role Description:
At Booking.com, technology is at the heart of everything we do. From empowering millions of travelers worldwide to enabling our internal teams to work smarter and faster, our platforms play a critical role in how we operate at scale.
With over 1.6 million room nights booked every day, accommodation represents the largest share of our business to date. We are responsible for accommodation growth, with clear ownership of all marketing, product and supply related to accommodations. Our mission is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.
B.Now is Booking.com’s enterprise ServiceNow platform, underpinning digital workflows across IT, Employee, Risk, Legal, Finance, Data, and Workspace domains. It acts as a trusted control plane connecting people, processes, and systems, supporting operational excellence, regulatory commitments, and strategic transformation across the business.
The platform is growing in importance and visibility. As B.Now becomes a broader enterprise capability, we need strong engineering leadership to ensure the platform is reliable, well-governed, trusted by stakeholders, and supported by a healthy, high-performing team.
As Engineering Manager in the ServiceNow Platform team, you will lead one or more engineering teams responsible for building, operating, and evolving B.Now as a reliable, scalable, and well-governed enterprise platform.
This role requires a combination of ServiceNow platform experience, people leadership, stakeholder management, and operational ownership. You will be accountable for team health, engineering performance, delivery outcomes, platform reliability, and the continued growth of B.Now as a trusted enterprise capability.
You are not expected to be a day-to-day ServiceNow developer. However, this is not a generalist EM role. You must bring meaningful ServiceNow experience and be technically credible enough to understand platform design, configuration versus customisation trade-offs, integrations, CMDB/CSDM, ITSM/ITOM/ITAM processes, platform lifecycle, and operational risk.
You will work with experienced ServiceNow engineers, developers, QA specialists, architects, product managers, and stakeholders across IT, Security, Risk, Legal, Finance, Employee Experience, Workspace, Data, Central Tech, and BHFS. Your role is to create clarity, manage trade-offs, develop people, remove blockers, and ensure the platform evolves in line with Booking.com’s strategic priorities and regulatory obligations, including SOX and DORA.
The successful candidate will be someone who can lead technical specialists, challenge decisions constructively, manage senior stakeholder expectations, and build a high-performing engineering team around a business-critical ServiceNow platform.
Lead, coach, and develop ServiceNow engineering teams across multiple platform capability areas.
Own the full people-management cycle, including regular 1:1s, feedback, performance management, career development, hiring input, succession planning, and team health.
Create a high-performance, inclusive culture focused on ownership, quality, accountability, psychological safety, and continuous learning.
Build trust and credibility with experienced ServiceNow specialists while still holding a clear leadership bar.
Support engineers in making good trade-offs between technical quality, speed, operational risk, compliance, and stakeholder needs.
Manage ambiguity, conflict, competing priorities, and stakeholder pressure without pushing unnecessary chaos into the team.
Act as a multiplier by creating clarity, simplifying decision-making, removing blockers, and enabling engineers to do their best work.
Provide leadership for the ongoing development, operation, and evolution of Booking.com’s ServiceNow platform.
Use your ServiceNow experience to guide platform conversations, challenge unnecessary complexity, and support sound architectural decision-making.
Work with architects and engineers to ensure ServiceNow solutions follow platform standards and remain secure, scalable, supportable, and upgradeable.
Understand and influence configuration versus customisation decisions, platform lifecycle management, technical debt, upgrade impact, and maintainability.
Support delivery across key ServiceNow capability areas, including ITSM, ITOM, ITAM, CMDB/CSDM, integrations, workflow automation, and enterprise service delivery.
Ensure ServiceNow capabilities are implemented in a way that supports long-term platform health, not only short-term stakeholder demand.
Act as a primary custodian of B.Now platform health, ensuring stability, performance, and availability for internal users and BHFS stakeholders.
Drive a unified operating view of the platform, including health signals for MID servers, discovery jobs, critical integrations, failed flows, slow transactions, long-running jobs, and recurring operational issues.
Ensure P1/P2 incidents raised in or by ServiceNow have clear ownership, timely escalation, appropriate communication, and follow-through on prevention actions.
Partner with engineers and architects to improve monitoring, alerting, dashboards, runbooks, incident response, and problem management.
Use service health metrics, Performance Analytics, incident trends, and stakeholder feedback to identify where the platform needs investment.
Balance new capability delivery with operational excellence, resilience, technical debt reduction, and supportability.
Partner with Product, Architecture, Security, Risk, Legal, Finance, HR, Central Tech, BHFS, and other business stakeholders to shape ServiceNow platform priorities and delivery plans.
Translate complex ServiceNow, operational, and regulatory trade-offs into clear business decisions for senior stakeholders.
Manage conflicting priorities across KTLO, Must-Do, regulatory, risk, technical debt, and strategic platform work.
Build trust in B.Now as an enterprise platform by improving transparency, governance, predictability, and delivery confidence.
Represent the team in roadmap discussions, service reviews, incident reviews, governance forums, and senior stakeholder conversations.
Be comfortable saying “not now” or “not this way” when requests create unnecessary customisation, support risk, upgrade risk, or long-term platform sustainability issues.
Ensure stakeholders understand the cost, risk, and operational impact of platform decisions.
Partner with the CMDB Manager, architects, engineers, and service owners to improve trust in foundational ServiceNow data.
Support initiatives that improve CMDB health, CSDM alignment, service ownership, service mapping, asset data quality, and audit readiness.
Help move the organisation from asset visibility toward service intelligence, ensuring relationships between technical components, applications, and business services are meaningful and governed.
Promote clear ownership models for data quality, integration accuracy, lifecycle states, and remediation actions.
Ensure data quality improvements are connected to practical outcomes such as incident response, compliance, asset risk management, service reporting, DORA reporting, and stakeholder trust.
Partner with Product Managers and stakeholders to shape ServiceNow roadmaps, priorities, and delivery plans.
Create clarity for the team by translating business needs into clear engineering outcomes, success measures, and delivery expectations.
Balance short-term delivery needs with long-term platform sustainability, quality, upgradeability, and maintainability.
Make prioritisation decisions using business impact, risk, regulatory needs, operational data, platform health, and engineering capacity.
Ensure the team has a healthy balance of KTLO, Must-Do, regulatory, technical debt, and strategic platform work.
Support governance through forums such as Architecture Review Board, ensuring new solutions remain supportable, secure, scalable, and aligned to Booking.com development guidelines.
Use outcome-focused reporting to communicate progress, risks, decisions, and trade-offs to stakeholders.
Meaningful experience working with, leading, or operating ServiceNow platforms in a complex enterprise environment.
Proven experience leading and developing engineering, platform, ServiceNow, enterprise workflow, or enterprise SaaS teams.
Experience as a direct or accountable people leader, including coaching, feedback, performance management, career development, hiring input, succession planning, and team health.
Strong understanding of ServiceNow architecture, configuration versus customisation trade-offs, platform lifecycle management, upgradeability, and maintainability.
Practical knowledge of ServiceNow capability areas such as ITSM, ITOM, ITAM, CMDB/CSDM, workflow automation, enterprise integrations, and service management processes.
Experience working with ServiceNow integrations and data flows across enterprise systems such as cloud platforms, identity, HR, finance, service directory, asset, risk, or security systems.
Strong stakeholder management skills, with experience aligning senior stakeholders, managing conflicting priorities, and translating business needs into clear ServiceNow platform outcomes.
Experience owning or operating a business-critical platform, including reliability, support models, incident readiness, operational metrics, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
Ability to lead technical specialists without needing to be the deepest expert, using ServiceNow knowledge, structured questioning, sound judgement, and clear ownership models.
Strong delivery and prioritisation skills, with the ability to balance KTLO, regulatory or Must-Do work, platform sustainability, technical debt, and strategic roadmap delivery.
Clear communication style, strong judgement, and the ability to operate effectively in a regulated, high-control, multi-stakeholder environment.
Benefits & Perks - Global Impact, Personal Relevance:
Booking.com’s Total Rewards Philosophy is not only about compensation but also about benefits. We offer a competitive compensation and benefits package, as well unique-to-Booking.com benefits which include:
Annual paid time off and generous paid leave scheme including: parent, grandparent, bereavement, and care leave
Hybrid working including flexible working arrangements, and up to 20 days per year working from abroad (home country)
Industry leading product discounts - up to 1400 per year - for yourself, including automatic Genius Level 3 status and Booking.com wallet credit
Living and working in Amsterdam, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe
Contributing to a high scale, complex, world renowned product and seeing real-time impact of your work on millions of travelers worldwide
Working in a fast-paced and performance driven culture
Opportunity to utilize technical expertise, leadership capabilities and entrepreneurial spirit
Promote and drive impactful and innovative engineering solutions
Technical, behavioral and interpersonal competence advancement via on-the-job opportunities, experimental projects, hackathons, conferences and active community participation
Competitive compensation and benefits package and some great added perks of working in the home city of Booking.com
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) at Booking.com:
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion have been a core part of our company culture since day one. This ongoing journey starts with our very own employees, who represent over 140 nationalities and a wide range of ethnic and social backgrounds, genders and sexual orientations.
Take it from our Chief People Officer, Paulo Pisano: “At Booking.com, the diversity of our people doesn’t just build an outstanding workplace, it also creates a better and more inclusive travel experience for everyone. Inclusion is at the heart of everything we do. It’s a place where you can make your mark and have a real impact in travel and tech.”
We ensure that colleagues with disabilities are provided the adjustments and tools they need to participate in the job application and interview process, to perform crucial job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment.
Application Process:
Booking.com is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. We strive to move well beyond traditional equal opportunity and work to create an environment that allows everyone to thrive.
