Booking Holdings Romania - Senior Manager (Data Engineering & Analytics)

Booking Holdings Romania is a Center of Excellence based in Bucharest, Romania and was created to support the increasing business demands of the Booking Holdings Brands. The Center of Excellence provides access to specialized and highly skilled talent, leading industry best practices, and collaboration opportunities across all of our Brands.

As part of our Booking Holdings Romania team, you will have the opportunity to be a part of the world’s leading provider of online travel, with a mission of making it easier for everyone to experience the world through five-primary consumer facing brands: Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, KAYAK and OpenTable.

As the Senior Manager leading the Romania Data Engineering & Analytics CoE, you will act as a visionary Engineering Leader and Change Agent. holding end-to-end accountability for operational efficiency, risk control, and the delivery of critical cross-brand platform initiatives. This role exists to bridge the gap between high-level business strategy and engineering execution, ensuring the team is technically prepared to innovate and manage complex future use cases. Success is defined by cultivating a high-performing culture that consistently delivers architectural excellence and operational stability while proactively mitigating delivery risks

In this high-impact role, you will be the primary technical guide for our engineering teams, a strategic partner to global leadership, and a cultural catalyst within the organization. You will be responsible for translating global business complexity into futuristic engineering solutions while mentoring a high-performing team of Engineering Managers and Team Leads.

This role provides a hybrid way of working with an onsite presence of 2 days/week.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties

1. Technical Leadership & Futuristic Vision 

• Engineering Guidance: Act as the ultimate technical authority, providing high-level guidance to Engineering Managers (EMs) and Team Leads to ensure technical excellence across all workstreams.

• Complex Problem Solving: Translate high-level global business requirements and project complexities into scalable, robust engineering solutions.

• Outside-the-Box Thinking: Challenge the status quo by encouraging "futuristic" engineering solutions that anticipate the needs of the Cross-Brand Platform 2–3 years in advance.

• Global Architecture: Ensure all local delivery is aligned with global complexity, ensuring solutions are built for the scale of Booking Holdings

• Executive Partnership: Act as a strategic partner to the global leadership team to define and execute the long-term vision for the Romania CoE. You will translate high-level organizational goals into actionable local operational plans.

• Innovation & Capability Building: Work closely with leadership to transform the CoE into a hub for innovation. You will champion the R&D agenda, developing new technical capabilities and piloting emerging Data & AI technologies locally to demonstrate value before global scaling.

2.  Risk Management & Governance

• Main Point of Escalation: Serve as the primary point of escalation for all delivery and operational risks. You are expected to resolve critical blockers and provide clear decision-making during high-pressure situations.

• Risk Control Ownership: Act as the overall Risk Control Owner for the portfolio. You will collaborate closely with Product Managers, Team Leads, and functional heads to identify, assess, and mitigate risks across the delivery lifecycle.

• Proactive Risk Reporting: Provide a continuous risk overview to the leadership team. You must maintain a "pulse check" on the organization to foresee potential issues early and present data-driven mitigation strategies to senior stakeholders.

3.  Technical Delivery & Engineering Excellence

• End-to-End Delivery Accountability: Retain overall responsibility for the successful delivery of all engineering solutions. While individual Product Managers drive specific scopes, you ensure the aggregate delivery meets the organization's standards for quality and timeliness.

• Cross-Brand Architecture: Ensure that all solutions strictly adhere to the defined Cross-Brand Architecture and enterprise engineering frameworks. You are the guardian of technical debt, ensuring the team builds scalable, secure, and maintainable software.

• Technical Leadership: Although this is a leadership role, you must provide high-level engineering, data, and analytics guidance. You will challenge technical assumptions and drive the team toward modern data engineering practices (CI/CD, automated testing, cloud-native design).

4.  Team Operational Excellence

• Efficient Delivery: Oversee Project and Process Management to ensure maximum efficiency, transparency, and high-velocity delivery.

• People Leadership & Development: Direct the people management strategy, including recruiting, performance management, and retention. You are responsible for defining clear development paths for team members, mentoring senior engineers, and building a strong bench of future technical leaders.

• Process Efficiency: Continuously review and optimize local operations to maximize throughput and team health, ensuring the team continues to work and deliver as expected during periods of growth or change.

• Change Agent: Serve as the primary driver for organizational shifts, helping the team adapt to new processes, technologies, and global strategies.

• Cultural Identity: Build a high-performance engineering culture in CoE that reflects both the local talent’s strengths and the global "BKNG" values.

5. People Leadership & Coaching (Leader of Leaders)

• Mentorship: Provide direct coaching to EMs and Team Leads, focusing on their growth as leaders, decision-makers, and technical architects.

• Global Connectivity: Act as a bridge between the local team and the global holding companies 

• Talent Development: Identify individual challenges within the team and provide the hands-on support or training needed to overcome them.

6.  Data Governance Operational Support

• Operational Partnership: Provide critical operational support to the Data Governance function. 

• Compliance Enablement: Act as the key liaison to facilitate governance requirements.

Role Qualifications and Requirements

• 10-12+ years of progressive experience in the Data, Analytics, or Software Engineering fields.
• Significant Leadership Experience: Minimum 5+ years in a senior management role (managing managers or large teams) with a proven track record of scaling high-performing technical teams in a global environment.
• Strategic Capability: Proven ability to translate complex, ambiguous business problems into clear technical roadmaps.
• Risk & Delivery Management: Proven experience acting as a risk owner and escalation point for large-scale enterprise projects.
• Process Mastery: Deep experience in Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD, with a track record of optimizing engineering processes for speed and quality.
• Communication: Exceptional English communication skills, with the ability to influence senior leadership & business stakeholders and inspire junior engineers alike.
• Technical Stack: Strong, hands-on background in Data Engineering and Cloud Analytics (Snowflake AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Engineering Best Practices: Deep understanding of Software Engineering principles (SDLC), Agile Methodology, DevOps, CI/CD, and modern Data Architecture (Data Mesh, Lakehouse, etc.)

• Strategic Vision: Ability to prepare the organization for future challenges and new business use cases.

• Communication: Exceptional English communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex risks and technical strategies to executive leadership.

• Collaboration: A collaborative mindset, capable of working intimately with existing Team Leads, Product Managers, and Global Heads to drive shared success.

• Technical Thought Leadership: Demonstrates the ability to anticipate industry shifts (e.g., AI/ML, Data Mesh) and translate them into scalable architectural frameworks that prepare the platform for future use cases. Capable of influencing global engineering standards and guiding complex "build vs. buy" decisions to balance technical innovation with long-term operational stability.

Benefits & Perks

• Contributing to a high scale, complex, world renowned product and seeing real-time impact of your work on millions of travelers worldwide

• Working in a fast-paced and performance driven culture

• Technical, behavioral and interpersonal competence advancement via on-the-job opportunities, experimental projects, hackathons, conferences and active community participation

• Competitive compensation and benefits package 

• Vast amounts of data to validate your ideas and the opportunity to experiment with real users

Booking Holdings is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. We strive to move well beyond traditional equal opportunity and work to create an environment that allows everyone to thrive.

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.