Engineering Manager - Flights FinOps

Booking.com; Amsterdam; Hybrid; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Amsterdam office

29 days holiday + bank holidays

On-site meals, coffee, snacks

Health & wellbeing benefits and health

Pension

Parental leave

Work from Abroad

Job summary

Booking.com is seeking an Engineering Manager in Amsterdam to lead a software engineering team within Flights FinOps. You will own the architecture, drive delivery, and mentor engineers, ensuring reliable payout orchestration, settlement, and reconciliation across payment models.

You will collaborate with product and operations to shape the roadmap, implement scalable financial systems, and uphold high standards of observability and incident response.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience managing a software engineering team.
• 5–8 years in backend distributed systems.
• Experience starting a new team and hiring.
• Hands-on with event-driven architectures (Kafka, SQS).
• Ownership of production systems, observability and incident management.
• Experience with financial, payments, or fintech domains.
• End-to-end delivery ownership from requirements to production.
• Ability to define a technical roadmap and drive decisions.
• Collaboration across teams and stakeholders.
• Experience with data integrity patterns in distributed financial systems.
• Experience with AWS native architectures (SQS, S3, EventBridge, Lambda).

Responsibilities

• Directly manage engineers and lead by example.
• Grow and develop engineering talent in the team.
• Foster a culture of collaboration and quality.
• Embed agile ways of working and Booking.com values.
• Architect APIs for high traffic systems.
• Oversee data processing and workflow management at scale.
• Own the team roadmap and architecture.
• Coach teams in technical detail as needed.
• Ensure traceability and auditable financial processing.

Skills

People leadership

Architectural thinking

Agile / delivery leadership

Stakeholder management

Technical mentoring

Tools

Kafka

SQS

EventBridge

Lambda

AWS cloud

Job description

N.B. This role does not come with relocation assistance, therefore candidates must be currently based in the Netherlands in order to be considered.

Job Title: Engineering Manager

Role location: Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Role Overview

This role sits within the Flights organization as part of Flights FinOps - a newly formed team responsible for the financial operations that ensure Flights pays its partners accurately and on time. As the Flights business grows in scale and complexity, this team will own the systems and processes that make that growth financially sustainable - payout orchestration, settlement, reconciliation and exception handling across suppliers and payment models. You will be joining at the ground floor of a greenfield engineering effort. While there is existing domain knowledge and operational context to build on, the team has the opportunity to architect financial systems the right way from the start - designed for scale, built with end-to-end observability, and engineered to the standard that financial processes demand. The domain is inherently high-stakes: every transaction must be traceable and auditable, and the systems you build must be resilient enough to support a fast-growing business where reliability directly impacts partner trust and customer experience.

Key Job Responsibilities And Duties

People Leadership

• Directly manage engineers
• Lead by example by taking ownership, being proactive and collaborating
• Nurture, grow and develop engineering talent in the team
• Foster a great culture that innovates, work together as a team, partner with other Booking.com com teams and roles and celebrates unified success
• Respect the Booking.com values and use them as a guide to the way we work

Technology, Craft & Delivery

• Experience in designing and architecting APIs, dealing with high traffic
• Experience in large scale data processing and workflow management
• Mastery in technology leadership
• Engineering delivery, quality and practices within own team
• Delivery of the wider engineering strategic objectives
• Embed agile ways of working and company values within the team
• Ability to get into the technical detail (where required) to coach, support and mentor the team
• Adhere to the default principles for architecture, quality and non-functional requirements
• Contribute to the evolution of best practices across the department
• Drive a culture of ownership and technical excellence, including reactive work such as incident escalations
• Learn new technologies and keep abreast of existing technologies to be able to share learnings and apply these to a variety of projects when needed

Architecture & Product Strategy

• Define, shape and deliver the roadmap
• Build new products, processes and operational plans
• Negotiate on the strategic importance of own product roadmap features
• Drive innovation in the team
• Own the architecture across the team

Role Qualifications And Requirements

• 3+ years of experience managing a team of software engineers; demonstrated experience hiring, coaching, and developing engineering talent
• 5–8 years of relevant experience in software development, building and scaling backend distributed systems
• Proven experience setting up a new team or function — defining ways of working, establishing engineering culture, and hiring the right people from scratch
• Hands‑on experience with event‑driven architectures and asynchronous processing (Kafka, SQS, or similar) in systems where reliability and delivery guarantees are critical
• Demonstrated ownership of critical production systems, including observability, incident management, post‑mortems, and operational excellence (SLIs/SLOs, dashboards, runbooks)
• Proven experience building systems where every transaction must be traceable, auditable, and accurate — the standard that financial processing demands
• Demonstrated ability to own delivery end‑to‑end: from shaping requirements with product and operations stakeholders through architecture, implementation, and production ownership
• Strong track record of collaborating across multiple teams and domains, aligning stakeholders with competing priorities, and driving decisions with a clear paper trail
• Ability to define and own the technical roadmap for the team, making sound architectural decisions with incomplete information
• Prior experience working in financial, payments, or fintech domains — payout orchestration, settlement, reconciliation, or exception handling
• Experience with data integrity and consistency patterns in distributed financial systems (idempotency, exactly‑once processing, compensation/saga patterns)
• Experience with AWS‑native architectures (SQS, S3, EventBridge, Lambda)

Benefits & Perks: Global Impact, Personal Relevance

Booking.com’s total rewards philosophy is not only about compensation but also about benefits. Our rewards are aimed at making it easier for you to experience all that life has to offer — all the messy, beautiful, and joyful bits — on your terms. So you can focus on what really matters. We offer competitive compensation as well as thoughtful, valuable, and even fun benefits which include:

• A great, brand new office to in the heart of Amsterdam
• 29 days’ paid holiday plus bank holidays
• On‑site meals, coffee, and snacks, including healthy and vegan options, daily
• Health & well‑being benefits such as mental health support, access to health insurance, etc.
• Employer contribution pension
• Industry‑leading parental leave and adoption leave
• From day one of your employment with us, we offer 22 weeks’ fully paid leave for all new parents, regardless of gender or the way you become a parent
• Great discounts on accommodation, car rentals and other group benefits
• Carer’s leave. 10 days’ fully paid leave per year for colleagues who are caring for ill family members.
• Hybrid Working (NL): We believe in office attendance at least 40% of your time whilst empowering you with the flexibility to plan where to do your best work, as well as up to 20 days per year to Work from Abroad* (subject to terms and conditions)

Inclusion at Booking.com

Take it from our Chief People Officer, Paulo Pisano: “At Booking.com, the diversity of our people doesn’t just create a unique 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.”

Pre-Employment Screening

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.