Lead Software Engineer

Loveholidays; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Company pension contributions

Individualised training budget

Discounted holidays

25 days annual leave (+8 holidays)

Buy/sell annual leave

Cycle to work scheme

Season ticket loan

Eye care vouchers

Job summary

loveholidays is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to drive architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and deliver scalable, high-performance services across cloud-native platforms. You will partner with product, design and data teams to evolve our real-time pricing, search and booking systems.

The role focuses on end-to-end ownership, modern tech stack including TypeScript/Java/Go/Python, and building robust systems in a fast‑growing travel tech environment, based in the UK.

Qualifications

• Proven ability to lead people from a technical and cultural perspective.
• Experience building scalable, high-performance applications with modern languages.
• Strong collaboration with engineers through pair programming.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and guidance to multiple teams.
• Design architectures aligned with short and long-term business goals.
• Build and run services at scale in the cloud.
• Mentor and grow your team.

Skills

Technical leadership

Team mentoring

Go/Java/Rust/Python

Pair programming

Observability

Web services/REST/HTTP

Containers/Kubernetes

Cloud / Google Cloud

Testing/Reliability/Monitoring

Systems design

Tools

Kubernetes

Google Cloud

BigQuery

Job description

Why Technology at loveholidays?

At loveholidays - we trailblaze together. We’re on a mission to open the world to everyone, giving our customers’ unlimited choice, unmatched ease and unmissable value for their next getaway. Our team is the driving force behind our role as our customers’ personal holiday expert - the smart way to get away.

Technology at loveholidays underpins our vision to become the global leader in packaged holidays. We drive cutting-edge innovation and technical excellence to futureproof the business. Our systems process trillions of daily holiday offers, we deploy over a thousand times a month, serving thousands of requests per second. This is where you can accelerate your growth by solving complex challenges and broadening your skillset.

Join us to create impact for our future in an exciting new chapter, owning your success and contributing to shared goals. We actively talk about technology and adhere to our key technology principles that have guided us this far. We are growing and have ambitious plans to expand across Europe, employing the best minds and technology to let us do this.

The impact you’ll have:

Lead Software Engineers at loveholidays will contribute to and develop expertise in:

• Supplier integration systems that process vast amounts of data

• Industry leading bespoke, high performance search and recommendation systems

• Sophisticated real time pricing systems

• ML-backed marketing optimisation systems

• Complex domain modelling and implementation of booking payment, fulfilment and management systems

• AI-powered solutions to assist customers pre and post booking

• Best in class, modern user experience through web and mobile applications

For a better understanding of our work, refer to some of our blog posts.

Or our open source contributions:

• github.com/loveholidays/ripley

• github.com/loveholidays/phrasebook

• github.com/loveholidays/po-test

As part of our tech culture we continuously improve our time to delivery, reducing errors and generally leaving things better than you found them.

Your day-to-day:

• Adoption of our engineering principles

• Building and running services at scale in the cloud

• Collaborating with engineers, designers, product managers within and outside of the team

• Providing technical leadership and guidance

• Understanding the wider context of the business and designing system architectures that meet short and long term business goals

• Mentoring and growing your team

Your skillset:

• Proven ability to lead people from a technical and cultural perspective

• You have proven experience in building scalable and high-performance applications, employing cutting edge algorithms, software design and technologies to do so.

• You enjoy collaborating with other engineers through pair programming.

• Observability

• Web services, REST, HTTP

• Containers, cloud

• Testing, reliability, monitoring

• Strong knowledge in building and owning application end-to-end, from inception to maintenance, to retirement

• Designing systems that scale

• Expertise in some of our main programming languages - TypeScript, Java, Golang, Rust, Python

Desirable:

• You have extensive experience coding in Go and Java.

• You are someone who can identify repetitive processes and transform them into automated solutions using LLMs, or build custom tools and integrations through code to unlock new efficiencies and opportunities.

• You have experience applying systems thinking to solve complex business and technical problems

• You have experience deploying applications in Kubernetes through Google Cloud.

• You are comfortable using BigQuery to analyse data to help identify areas of opportunity within the team.

• You have knowledge and understanding of the travel sector.

The interview journey:

• Intro with a member of the Talent Acquisition team - 30 mins

• Virtual 1st stage with two Software Engineers - 45 mins

• Take-home challenge

• Final stage with key stakeholder/s, in office - 3 hours

  • Challenge discussion - 1 hour

  • Reliability and Infrastructure - 45 mins

  • Tech and Product Culture - 45 mins

Perks of joining us:

• Company pension contributions at 5%.

• Individualised training budget for you to learn on the job and level yourself up.

• Discounted holidays for you, your family and friends.

• 25 days of holidays per annum (plus 8 public holidays) increases by 1 day for every second year of service, up to a maximum 30 days per annum.

• Ability to buy and sell annual leave.

• Cycle to work scheme, season ticket loan and eye care vouchers.

At loveholidays, we focus on developing an inclusive culture and environment that encourages personal growth and collective success. Each individual offers unique perspectives and ideas that increase the diversity and effectiveness of our teams. And we value the insight and potential you could bring on our continued journey.

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