Role Description:
Director of Engineering Ecosystems
About Booking.com
Established in 1996 in Amsterdam, Booking.com has grown from a small Dutch start-up to one of the largest ecommerce companies in the world. Booking.com is the largest business within Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG) and accounts for the vast majority of Booking Holdings’ total revenue. Booking Holdings is a leading Fortune 500 e-commerce conglomerate with a market cap of roughly $166 billion (2025). Booking.com currently employs approximately 13,000 employees in 140 offices in 70 countries worldwide.
With a mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world, Booking.com invests in digital technology that helps take the friction out of travel. Booking.com connects travelers with the world’s largest selection of incredible places to stay, including everything from apartments, vacation homes, and family-run B&Bs to 5-star luxury resorts and even tree houses. The Booking.com website and mobile apps are available in over 44 languages, offer more than 28M total reported listings, and cover over 174,000 destinations in 229 countries worldwide. Offering 30 different types of places to stay, including homes, apartments, B&Bs, hostels, farm stays, bungalows, even boats, igloos, and treehouses. So whether travelling for business or leisure, customers can instantly book their ideal accommodation quickly and easily, without booking fees and backed up by its promise to price match. Via the customer experience team, customers can reach Booking.com 24/7 for assistance and support in over 44 languages, any time of the day or night.
At Booking.com, we are all involved in making hundreds of decisions every day. The decisions we make are a reflection of our Values - they reflect what is important to us, both as individuals and as an organisation.
When Values are made explicit, they provide clarity on what “good” looks like. And when they are shared, they build unity in a group. They build culture.
Think customer first. We obsess about adding value for our customers - guests, partners, colleagues - to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.
Own it. We deliver on our promises, make informed decisions and prioritize to get the important things done today.
Learn forever. We are resilient, take time to reflect, and seek to learn – from colleagues, from the outside world and from our failures.
Succeed together. We celebrate team success, through making connections, building trust and valuing the diverse perspectives of others.
Do the right thing. We get the right results the right way. For each other, our communities and the world around us.
Role Profile:
The Director of Engineering Ecosystems is responsible for shaping the internal technical strategy and delivering a world-class technology ecosystem by leading the engineering and deployment of Generative AI (GenAI) agents and agentic workflows to enable Booking.com engineers to design, build, test, deploy, and operate software efficiently and reliably.
Unlike consumer-facing products, this organization focuses entirely on internal engineering enablement and accelerating GenAI assisted developer velocity. This role will identify friction and gaps in our existing developer journey, mitigating them by selecting, adapting, and innovating best-in-class internal tools, automated workflows, and unified platforms (including our Engineering Portal, BHFS workstreams). The ideal candidate will evangelize software engineering excellence, modern SDLC (software development lifecycle) practices, and compliance across the global technology organization, and play a key strategic role providing thought leadership to fully embed GenAI to transform our software delivery lifecycle.
Responsibilities:
Strategic Platform Direction & Developer Velocity:
Drive the Developer Journey Strategy: Own the vision and execution for reducing friction across the entire Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), ensuring a fast, safe, and easy path from code to production.
Drive the GenAi Engineering Strategy: Develop, enhance and deliver the GenAI engineering strategy, ensuring the company leads in the industry with adoption of AI powered tools and working practices
Modernize Tooling & Automation: Oversee the evolution of internal platforms, including automated workflows, reliable on-demand testing environments, and a unified Engineering Portal.
Ecosystem Lifecycle Management: Lead the lifecycle of internal technologies from launch to deprecation, mapping tooling and platform investments directly to internal developer productivity, velocity metrics, and reliability.
Lead Critical Workstreams: Direct initiatives across Backend & SRE within the ecosystem, including BHFS workstreams and automated compliance frameworks.
Organisational Leadership and Culture:
Build a High-Performance Organization: Lead a diverse, multi-disciplinary engineering organization—including software engineers, SREs, technical product managers, and systems experts - delivering on predictable, agile schedules.
Talent Bench & Mentorship: Coach, mentor, and develop technical directors, senior managers, and principal/senior engineering talent, establishing a strong leadership bench.
Foster Tech Communities: Develop and anchor technical guilds and internal developer communities across Booking.com to drive adoption of ecosystem standards, skill development, and cross-company training.
Attract & Retain Talent: Partner with HR and talent acquisition to create clear career pathways, set high-performance expectations, and showcase Booking.com's internal technical investments to the wider industry.
Cross Functional Collaboration & Influence:
Partner with Engineering Leaders: Collaborate deeply with product and technical counterparts across Booking.com business units to understand their specific engineering challenges and ensure the Core Platform ecosystem unblocks their delivery.
Cross-BU GenAI Engineering leadership: lead and influence cross-BU stakeholders, to accelerate GenAI adoption, productivity gains and efficiency, ensuring that we leverage collective and unified benefit from evangelisation of tools and working practices happening across all BUs.
Business, Legal & Financial Alignment: Advocate for internal tooling and platform investments to finance, legal and business partners, translating technical debt and developer friction into clear business impacts, risks, and long-term ROI.
Ideal Experience & Skills:
Engineering Expertise & Operational Leadership: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science (or equivalent practical experience) with a significant track record leading and inspiring large engineering organizations and managing managers within global, internet-scale environments.
GenAI & Agentic Systems Vision: Proven ability to build, scale, and govern internal generative AI tooling and agentic workflow infrastructure. Experience evaluating and integrating external AI/ML developer tools (e.g., Claude, Cursor, Codex) and designing custom, domain-specific agents.
SDLC & Modernization Expertise: Deep understanding of modern software engineering methodologies, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, automated testing frameworks, and cloud-native architecture (containers, serverless), with a demonstrable focus on automation, validation and testing of AI-generated code and establishing confidence signals for high-velocity changes. Demonstrable experience of managing or contributing to complex systems and architecture modernisation programs, particularly enabling and accelerating monolith to micro-service transformations.
Developer Experience (DevEx) Passion: Strong critical thinking regarding developer velocity metrics (e.g., DORA metrics) and how to apply them to improve the day-to-day work of engineers.
Ecosystem Knowledge: Familiarity with managing a mix of custom-built internal portals, open-source developer tools, and enterprise SaaS systems (such as Gitlab/Harness and GenAI productivity tools), and demonstrable knowledge of FinOps and Token Economics as applied to managing the cost, governance, and long-term financial sustainability of large-scale AI and cloud platforms.
Executive Presence & Stakeholder Influence: Exceptional executive storytelling and communication skills, with a track record of partnering across complex, matrixed business units and building strong alignment with senior leadership and key stakeholders (VPs, SVPs, Finance, and Legal).
Mindset: Independent, pragmatic, and proactive work attitude with a passion for long-term strategic outlook combined with incremental, iterative improvements. Lives by Booking.com's leadership expectations in their daily work and leadership of their teams.
OTHER PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
Character traits: open mind, learning attitude, transparent behavior, positive, overachiever, strong communicator, proactive and collaborative.
Strategic thinker yet focused on execution; able to roll up sleeves to get things done.
Ability to function in a fast-moving entrepreneurial environment.
Data driven, experimental, ready to learn and open to change.
Keep the customer at the centre of everything you do.
Good cultural and organizational sensitivity.
Committed to building a diverse, inclusive work environment.
