Senior Data Engineer - Taxis

Job Description

Senior Data Engineer - Taxis

Who are we?

We're BookingGo, the ground transport division of Booking.com. We're the ones who empower people to get where they're going. Whether they're taking the wheel or sitting back and leaving it to the driver. Whether they're heading straight from A to B or enjoying the freedom to go wherever their journey takes them.

To do that, we offer car hire to our customers through our Rentalcars.com brand and car hire, taxis and ticketed transfer services through Booking.com. We also have a B2B solution, Rentalcars Connect, providing great ground transportation options to the customers of our partners

With our HQ in Manchester, we're part of the worldwide Booking.com family. At the same time, we're proud of our own unique identity. Speaking 42 languages, our 2,000+ staff come from all over the world, just like our customers. What brings us together is our love of adventure: our own as well as other people's. It's easy to be passionate about a job that enriches so many lives on a daily basis, and our workplace reflects our passion, our diversity, our global focus. Just search "Manchester's coolest office" and see for yourself.

And we're in good company. Together with priceline.com, KAYAK, agoda.com, and OpenTable, we're part of Booking Holdings, the world leader in online travel and related services.

Where are we going?

• Cross functional agile teams who own their products in a Continuous Delivery DevOps environment
• Revolutionise our online customer experience through a great web site and mobile app
• Data driven decisions using Kibana, Hadoop, monitoring, Big Data, MI and MVT testing
• Continuous improvement, keeping it simple and developing the team
• Great engineering practices with a focus on TDD and BDD principles and a strong focus on non-functional requirements at the beginning rather than an afterthought
• Decoupled service orientated architecture with resilience and adaptability built in

We have a great journey ahead and our vision is to radically change the working practices to realise our ambition of being a “World Class” engineering function and the “Technology Employer of Choice” in the Northwest and beyond. Make no mistake we have a challenging journey ahead but we are committed to delivering a great customer experience across web, mobile, call centre and partner channels and this is where you could fit in.

About the role:

We are part of BookingGo, the ground transport unit of Booking.com, and our mission is to empower people to experience the world. As part of BookingGo, our Taxis team is building the best way for our customers to get from A to B.

What it’s like to work in our team:

• We’re customer-obsessed: we know customers better than they know themselves
• We love solving problems: we dig deep to understand what’s really going on, solving problems based on data and insights. But we also know that sometimes we have to follow our beliefs.
• We get it done: we work hard together to ship great product. In our team, and outside it.
• We dive deep: everybody rolls up their sleeves
• We’re straight-talking: we have honest conversations even when they’re tough. We retro a lot.
• We work together: in small cross-functional teams - design, product, engineering & commercial
• We love having fun: we’re a small team that likes having a laugh - and playing Friday tunes!
• We get better every day: we want to be the best at what we do. We push each other to excel.

We launched our Taxis team two years ago with the goal of becoming the best way to get to and from the airport. We started offering airport transfers on booking.com while also building our direct business, rideways.com. We are now rapidly expanding Taxis as well as building additional new transport products to get our customers from A to B in the best way possible.

What are we looking for?

We are looking for a superb and enthusiastic Senior Data Engineer for our Taxis team, who will push the boundaries on engineering brilliant solutions and contribute to shaping our new future. We expect you to have the energy and passion to deliver using a whole range of technologies and have a solid understanding of engineering principles.

The role of Senior Data Engineer will be working on a small team with a new product focussing on covering data from lots of different places.

Ideally we’d expect all our Engineers to have or be willing to learn to following skills and capabilities:

• Assemble large, complex data sets that meet functional / non-functional business requirements.
• Identify, design, and implement internal process improvements: automating manual processes, optimizing data delivery, re-designing infrastructure for greater scalability, etc.
• Build the capability required for optimal extraction, transformation and loading of data from a variety of data sources using SQL, ‘big data’ technologies on prem and in the cloud.
• Build industry leading analytics tools that utilize the data pipeline to provide actionable insights into customer acquisition, operational efficiency and other key business performance metrics.
• Work with engineering teams, data and analytics experts to deliver greater functionality in our data systems.
• Keep our data separated and secure inline business and regulatory constraints. Having a good understanding of security principles and secure coding
• Work with stakeholders including Product, Data and Design teams to assist with data-related technical issues and support their data infrastructure needs.
• Maintain and when appropriate re-architect any legacy data and reporting capabilities.

We have a diverse technology estate and therefore our Data Engineers typically work in one of the following areas and are also free to move between areas as part their career development and aspirations:

Data Warehouse Engineering

• Solid understanding of database technologies such as MySQL and SQL Server
• Understanding of ETL methodologies
• Solid data analysis and query skills using such things as: SSRS, SSAS
• Report writing skills using tools such as Power BI and SSRS

Big Data Engineers

• Good understanding of the full Hadoop eco system
• Proficient in some / all the following: Scala, Spark, Kafka, Akka
• Proficient with the use of Java. Knowledge of PHP or Python would be beneficial

Service development

Developing services and components within product domains that do not have public facing web site components for example our Finance API’s which pass data to 3^rd party systems such as Blackline and SAP.

• Proficient with the use of Java
• Good understanding of web services and REST based APIs using JSON and XML
• Good understanding of database technologies such as MySql, SQL Server
• Understanding of domain driven design and SOA

Any other beneficial skills?

• Quality first mind-set for writing code using techniques such as TDD or BDD
• Commercial experience in an e-commerce background and A/B testing
• An understanding of Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Agile practices
• Cloud technologies such as AWS and container technologies such as Docker

What will your responsibilities be?

• Write high quality robust code including tests
• Sense of ownership and the quality of the solutions you produce
• Adhere to the defaults principles for Architecture, quality and non-functional requirements
• Build, design and deliver high quality solutions in line with guidance and best practices of the department
• Collaborate with the team and others to deliver high quality solutions
• Design and develop reusable libraries, ETL processes, APIs etc. that are easy to understand and maintain
• Learn new technologies and keep abreast of existing technologies and be able to apply these to your work
• Contribute to the evolution of best practices of the department
• Write, review and take responsibility for clear, concise and comprehensive technical documentation
• Supporting live products in a DevOps environment where required
• Have fun

What do we offer our employees?

• Ownership of your work and a great technical challenge
• A great new office to work in the heart of Manchester
• Great facilities including subsidised canteen and Starbucks, free breakfast & fruit and cycle hub
• An exciting and dynamic place to work
• 25 days paid holiday plus bank holidays (rising to 28 days after 3 years of service)
• Great discounts on accommodation, car rentals and other group benefits
• Opportunity to shape the future of the team
• Software development kit that works!

We want our colleagues to have a work life balance that works both for them and the business. Our core hours are 10-4 with flexibility around that within a 37.5 hour week. We are also open to considering other flexible working arrangements. Our Talent Specialists will discuss this with you if your application is progressed.