Principal Software Engineer - Cloud and Platform Ecosystems

Overview

Our mission at Booking.com is to create transformative, innovative, and personalized travel experiences for millions of customers worldwide. To support this, we build and operate modern infrastructure platforms that empower developers with reliable, scalable, and easy-to-use compute services—both in our private data centers and in the cloud.

We are on a multi-year journey to modernize our infrastructure, drive cloud adoption, and continuously improve the developer experience at scale.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer in Bangalore to lead the architecture, technical strategy and evolution of multiple platforms, advocating software delivery best practices for our engineering teams, mentoring engineers and engaging with Booking’s global technical leadership community. The immediate scope of work for the right candidate includes the following topics:

• Booking Kubernetes Service (BKS) - Our Kubernetes-powered container-as-a-service platform that runs seamlessly with Booking’s app and platform layers across both on premise servers and AWS, and currently hosts over 3000 services.
• Virtualization - VMs are currently offered to engineers at Booking for operating production workloads, running development, test environments etc. via an OpenStack powered, on-prem IaaS offering, a homegrown libvirt based virtualization solution for on-premise workloads and via AWS EC2 in the public cloud.
• ITDR - Developing disaster recovery platforms and solutions to safeguard Booking.com’s business continuity and resilience in the face of risks like ransomware attacks.
  
  
  

What you’ll be doing

• Shape the architecture & roadmap for Kubernetes, Virtualization and Disaster Recovery platforms to ensure scalability, security, reliability, and developer friendliness.
• Serve as a technical leader on high-impact, cross-team projects with direct influence on Booking.com’s infrastructure modernization and cloud migration.
• Hands-on development of proofs-of-concept, new capabilities and key improvements in platform services.
• Partner with product managers and engineers to define requirements and deliver scalable, resilient solutions for internal customers.
• Provide technical mentorship and raise the bar for engineering excellence across multiple teams.
• Evangelize design patterns and best practices for distributed systems, cloud infrastructure and developer productivity at company level.
• Stay ahead of industry trends, evaluate emerging technologies and guide adoption where impactful.
• Advocate customer-first design by ensuring platforms are intuitive, reliable and efficient for Booking.com’s development community.
  
  
  

What you’ll bring

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in senior technical leadership or architect roles.
• Proven success designing, building and operating large-scale distributed systems with high availability and performance.
• Solid understanding of networking, storage, security, and distributed systems fundamentals.
• Experience with cloud migrations and/or hybrid infrastructure (data centers + cloud).
• Strong coding skills in one or more languages (Go, Python, Java, C++ etc.).
• Passion for developer productivity (CI/CD pipelines, testing strategies, developer workflows).
• Expertise in the following or similar areas would be preferred:
• Kubernetes and container orchestration at scale.
• Virtualization technologies (libvirt/KVM/QEMU, VMware, or cloud VM services such as AWS EC2).
• Disaster recovery solutions with well-defined RTO and RPO.
  
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence technical direction and mentor engineers across teams.
• Customer-first mindset and a drive to deliver developer-friendly infrastructure platforms.
  
  

What we offer

• Opportunity to define and scale core infrastructure platforms that power the world’s largest travel booking platform.
• Work alongside highly skilled engineers in a global, collaborative environment.
• Competitive compensation and benefits.
• A culture of ownership, experimentation, and continuous learning.