Senior Platform Engineer I - Evergreen

Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG); Bengaluru; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 6,000,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

—

Job summary

Booking Holdings seeks senior software professionals to lead end-to-end system ownership, architectural guidance, and automation efforts in Bengaluru. You will drive reliability, observability, and scalable design across services, while mentoring junior engineers and shaping engineering standards.

Responsibilities include incident management, RCA, and postmortem processes, with a strong emphasis on efficient delivery and reducing toil through automation.

Qualifications

• Experience building software applications across domains with focus on reliability and maintainability.
• Ability to evaluate architectures balancing cost, constraints, and business goals.
• Proven track record in end-to-end ownership of services and platforms.
• Strong incident response, RCA, and postmortem skills.
• Experience driving automation to reduce toil and improve efficiency.
• Expertise in observability, metrics, and alerting strategies.

Responsibilities

• Owns services end-to-end, defines SLIs/SLOs and tracks operational health.
• Evaluates and guides architectural directions for scalable systems.
• Leads proactive performance tuning and code optimization.
• Mentors engineers, improving engineering practices across teams.
• Collaborates with product and operations to ensure reliability.
• Coordinates incident response, RCA, and postmortem activities.

Skills

Building Software Applications

Software System Design

End to End System Ownership

Technical Incident Management

Automation & Toil

Observability & Monitoring

Critical Thinking

Continuous Quality & Process

Effective Communication

Architectural Guidance

Coaching & Mentoring

Education

Master degree

Job description

Building Software Applications

• Application Engineering: Responsible for building software applications using relevant development languages, systems, services, and tools tailored to the business domain, while guiding junior team members.
• Code Optimization: Refactors and simplifies codebases using established design patterns, setting architectural standards for junior engineers.
• Quality Assurance: Ensures application quality and reliability by adhering to standard testing strategies, techniques, and automated testing methods.
• Maintainable Code: Writes readable, reusable, and modular code by enforcing standardized design patterns and leveraging core software libraries.
• Data Security & Governance: Enforces data security, integrity, and compliance standards across applications in alignment with organizational best practices.

Software Systems Design

• Architectural Evaluation: Evaluates architectural solutions by balancing operational cost, technical constraints, business goals, and emerging technologies.
• Impact Analysis: Assesses system dependencies and models the structural implications of adding or modifying applications within the broader architecture.
• Rapid Prototyping: Accelerates business growth and technical discovery through prototyping, technical spikes, and third-party vendor evaluations.
• Scalable Solution Design: Designs adaptable systems that satisfy immediate operational needs while remaining extensible for future capability expansions.

End-to-End System Ownership

• Service Lifecycle Management: Owns services end-to-end by monitoring application health, defining critical metrics (SLIs/SLOs), and resolving operational drifts.
• Risk Mitigation & Documentation: Reduces business continuity risks and eliminates single points of dependency by maintaining clear runbooks, OpDocs, and technical documentation.
• Continuous Delivery: Accelerates customer feedback loops and reduces deployment risk through continuous integration, progressive delivery, and feature experimentation frameworks.
• Production Autonomy: Independently manages production deployment pipelines, infrastructure operations, and release management while mentoring junior engineers.

Technical Incident Management

• SLA-Driven Mitigation: Diagnoses and resolves live production outages to minimize customer impact and adhere to established service level agreements.
• Root Cause Analysis (RCA): Eliminates recurring failures and builds systemic resilience through thorough root-cause investigations and long-term bug fixes.
• Postmortem Process: Contributes to post-incident reviews, tracks production failure modes, and maintains centralized incident logs.

Automation and Toil Reduction

• Technical Debt Elimination: Keeps infrastructure components up to date by addressing operational bottlenecks, removing technical debt, and planning for capacity scale.
• Operational Efficiency: Reduces infrastructure maintenance costs by adopting automated workflows, leveraging modern technologies, and managing vendor integrations.
• Toil Elimination: Eliminates manual operational tasks by developing custom software utilities, internal tools, and automation scripts targeting latency and scaling goals.

Monitoring and Alerting Improvements

• Observability Strategy: Monitors capacity, infrastructure health, and key business indicators (KPIs) to maintain peak application performance and system availability.
• Reliability Partnership: Partners with software development teams to define appropriate telemetry, trace contexts, and custom observability metrics.

Critical Thinking

• Pattern Recognition: Analyzes complex, high-stress technical scenarios to identify systemic issues and implement structured, logical solutions.
• Solution Evaluation: Constructively evaluates proposals and architectures, applying 'SMART' framework improvements backed by objective data and industry standards.

Continuous Quality and Process Improvement

• Process Optimization: Identifies operational and structural inefficiencies across workflow systems to drive measurable performance improvements.
• Standardization: Designs and rolls out modern engineering standards, updated process flows, and delivery best practices to improve overall team output.

Effective Communication

• Targeted Communication: Delivers clear, well-structured technical messaging adapted to both executive and technical audiences across varied mediums.
• Consensus Building: Facilitates technical alignment through active listening, clear negotiation, and adaptable problem-solving.
• Active Engagement: Asks targeted follow-up questions to uncover technical requirements, clarify ambiguity, and align cross-functional teams.

Architectural Guidance

• Technical Direction: Advises product and application teams on architectural designs to ensure functional, non-functional, and enterprise requirements are met.
• Target Architecture Alignment: Sets strategic technical directions by evaluating legacy systems and aligning target architectures with stakeholders.

Coaching/Mentoring

• Team Enablement: Coaches, mentors, and upskills team members across all levels by sharing technical expertise, operational knowledge, and engineering best practices.

Level of Education

• Master degree

Years of relevant Job Knowledge.

• Advanced Knowledge (8+ years)

Requirements Of Special Knowledge/skills

• Building Software Applications
• Software System Design
• End to End System Ownership
• Technical Incident Management
• Operations (Automation, Toil)
• Observability (Monitoring; Alerting)
• Critical Thinking
• Continuous Quality & Process Improvement
• Effective Communication
• Architectural Guidance
• Coaching & Mentoring

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 position.