About Booking.com

Established in 1996 in Amsterdam, Booking.com has grown from a small Dutch start-up to one of the largest ecommerce companies in the world. Booking.com is the largest business within Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG) and accounts for the vast majority of Booking Holdings' total revenue. Booking Holdings is a leading Fortune 500 e-commerce conglomerate with a market cap of roughly $166 billion (2025). Booking.com currently employs approximately 13,000 employees in 140 offices in 70 countries worldwide.

With a mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world, Booking.com invests in digital technology that helps take the friction out of travel. Booking.com connects travelers with the world's largest selection of incredible places to stay, including everything from apartments, vacation homes, and family-run B&Bs to 5-star luxury resorts and even tree houses. The Booking.com website and mobile apps are available in over 44 languages, offer more than 28M total reported listings, and cover over 174,000 destinations in 229 countries worldwide. Offering 30 different types of places to stay, including homes, apartments, B&Bs, hostels, farm stays, bungalows, even boats, igloos, and treehouses. In addition to accommodations, customers can book flights to over 4,500 destinations, book curated attractions and experiences in over 2,300 cities and reserve rental cars in over 140 countries. Via the customer experience team, customers can reach Booking.com 24/7 for assistance and support in over 44 languages, any time of the day or night.

At Booking.com, we are all involved in making hundreds of decisions every day. The decisions we make are a reflection of our Values - they reflect what is important to us, both as individuals and as an organisation.

When Values are made explicit, they provide clarity on what "good" looks like. And when they are shared, they build unity in a group. They build culture.

• Think customer first. We obsess about adding value for our customers - guests, partners, colleagues - to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.

• Own it. We deliver on our promises, make informed decisions and prioritize to get the important things done today.

• Learn forever. We are resilient, take time to reflect, and seek to learn - from colleagues, from the outside world and from our failures.

• Succeed together. We celebrate team success, through making connections, building trust and valuing the diverse perspectives of others.

• Do the right thing. We get the right results the right way. For each other, our communities and the world around us.

Profile VP Engineering & Data

The Trips Business Unit (Trips) is central to realizing Booking.com's vision of the Connected Trip. Trips is responsible for building world-class experiences across key travel categories-including Flights, Rental Cars, Rides, Attractions/Experiences, and Insurance-on a global scale. Beyond leading these verticals, Trips ensures high-quality and consistent traveler experiences by adhering to Booking.com-wide data and technology standards.

The VP Engineering & Data for Trips will own and drive the technology, infrastructure, and data strategy that enables the sustained growth of Trips and a consistent experience across the wider Booking.com ecosystem. This critical leadership role oversees a team of 600+ engineers across multiple vertical teams and locations (main locations: Manchester, London, Amsterdam, India), shaping multiple customer and partner propositions.

The VP will continue leading our journey of platform transformation - focused on modernization and standardization within Trips and the core Booking platforms - to build highly reliable, scalable, and flexible systems that support the long-term Connected Trip vision. This includes leading engineering & data teams and their performance, integrating modern engineering and data practices, including Generative AI.

The organizational setup operates in a matrix structure with distributed domain-based/vertical teams as well as leveraging horizontal services. The VP is accountable for aligning the Trips Technology & Data strategy with the overall Technology & Data strategy (led by the Booking.com CTO) and is a key member of the VP Tech Council (Tech Circle) that governs standard solutions and best practices globally for Booking.com.

Key priorities for the coming years include:

• Modernize and standardize the Trips technology and data estate where appropriate.

• Build trusted data foundations that enable personalization, analytics, and AI

• Improve delivery velocity, operational resilience, and drive responsible innovation

• Effectively and responsibly integrate AI tooling and usage into engineering and data processes and ways of working. Where appropriate, drive the shift from traditional heuristics to AI-first product experiences.

Key Relationships

• Reports to: SVP, Trips (with a dotted line to the CTO)

• Direct reports: Engineering & Data Directors / leads in each Trips vertical, Site Leader Trips in Bangalore, Director Architecture Trips (7)

• Key Peer relationships: VPs in Central Technology, Accomodations, Marketplace, Fintech, Marketing, Product leaders in Trips

Responsibilities

Technology Strategy & Architecture

• Strategy & Planning: Own and deliver the Trips Engineering and Data strategy, ensuring alignment with Central Technology and business objectives to support long-term revenue and profit growth. This role includes ownership of the Trips Data (Engineering) strategy and shared data foundations required to support product development, operational decision-making, analytics, machine learning, and AI-enabled use cases across Trips.

• Platform Leadership: Define and oversee the platform architecture to ensure the delivery of scalable, secure, and reliable platforms that underpin all product, operational, analytical, and AI-driven business priorities.

• Innovation & Standards: Drive technology innovation and the adoption of modern engineering and data craft standards across the unit. Accelerate responsible adoption of Generative AI across engineering and data workflows to improve developer productivity, operational efficiency, and customer or partner value where relevant.

• System Integrity: Ensure stability and financial efficiency of all core technical systems, establishing appropriate reporting and alerting mechanisms for rapid deficiency identification and resolution.

Leadership, Team & Organization

• Leadership: Direct reports include a mix of Senior Directors and Directors in Engineering and Data who support across Trips verticals.

• Talent Leadership: Lead and manage a large, multi-site, multi-geography team of circa 650 colleagues (including Manchester, London, Bangalore and Amsterdam hubs, plus outsourced staff and contractors), with additional dotted-line management of a circa 130-person team in the Booking Holdings India Centre of Excellence.

• Organizational Effectiveness: Ensure an efficient and effective organizational setup through regular reviews, appropriate evolution, and change management. Collaborate with Trips vertical Managing Directors and Product leaders to optimize resource allocation and overall team effectiveness.

• Culture & Talent Development: Create an exciting, dynamic, and forward-thinking working environment that engages, retains, and nurtures talent, alongside driving development programs for the engineering & data community within the business unit.

• Own and drive the global talent acquisition strategy for the Trips Engineering and Data organization to ensure the team can scale effectively to meet business growth, focusing on attracting and hiring diverse, world-class technical talent.

Governance & Strategic Alignment

• Strategic Influence: Actively participate in the Trips Leadership Team, contributing to broader strategic decision-making beyond the technical agenda. Act as a key member of the Booking.com Tech and Data Councils (Tech Circle), influencing and shaping engineering & data policy and practice globally. Partner closely with Product leadership to align technology and data investment, delivery priorities, and organizational design to the Trips roadmap and business goals.

• Compliance & Security: Own delivery accountability for all Booking.com and Trips security, cyber, and compliance policies and standards. Ensure technology solutions are compliant with all legal, regulatory, and company-driven technical guidelines.

• Statutory Duties: Where appropriate, take on statutory directorship responsibilities within Trips legal entities.

• Cross-Functional Alignment: Ensure clear direction and alignment for Trips services and systems during Planning and day-to-day processes across all cross-functional work with other business units within the Booking.com organization.

Financial, Budget & Service Ownership (P&L)

• Manage the Technology & Data Budget and P&L: Own, manage, and be accountable for the Trips Engineering & Data operating and capital expenditure budget (OpEx/CapEx), driving financial discipline and making investment trade-offs to maximize ROI on technology spend.

• Accountability for Service Reliability: Be ultimately accountable for the reliability, availability, performance, and scalability (RAPS) of all production services and data pipelines within the Trips portfolio, championing a strong Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) culture. For data this includes data quality, pipeline reliability, SLAs for critical data assets and products, observability and incident management across data services.

Ideal Experience And Skills

Leadership, Scale, and Strategic Acumen

• Education: Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Engineering (or equivalent practical experience) is required; a Master's or advanced degree is preferred.

• Global Leadership at Scale: Extensive experience leading a large, multi-site, multi-geography technology, engineering & data function, preferably in a tech or platform-business.

• Strategic & Organizational Change: Proven track record of driving significant technological and organizational change and transformation, including evolving operating models and resource allocation.

• Executive Influence: Expert ability to partner with global executives, manage high-stakes strategic initiatives, and effectively influence stakeholders at all levels to drive business outcomes (innovation, customer metrics, and revenue growth).

• Change and Operational Management: Ability to go deep into technology and detail where needed without loosing the big picture to drive forward operational excellence and delivery. Experienced in driving and leading change successfully throughout large organisations. Comfortable working with ambiguity.

• Results & Execution: Demonstrated ability to manage costs, meet critical deadlines, and drive multiple complex initiatives simultaneously in a complex, fast-paced, performance- and data-driven environment.

Technical & Platform Expertise

• Technology Strategy: Demonstrable experience in setting and leading the end-to-end technology strategy across multiple business lines and product portfolios, particularly within a complex, matrixed organization.

• Modern Engineering at Scale: Deep expertise in leading and inspiring large Engineering and Data organizations, with a focus on modern engineering practices, distributed domain-based architectures, and efficient scaling using cloud/elastic infrastructure.

• Agile Delivery: Demonstrable experience leading Agile Engineering & Data functions at scale, with a clear focus on high-velocity delivery of working software.

• Platform & Data Depth: Deep understanding of modern engineering and data platforms, including architecture, governance, scalability, reliability, and the business-critical data capabilities required for an enterprise. Demonstrable experience leading Data Engineering or modern data platform capabilities at scale, including data architecture, governance, reliability, and the enablement of analytics, experimentation, machine learning, and AI use cases.

• Customer-Facing Experience: Solid, direct experience with digital customer-facing products in the web and mobile space.

Generative AI Strategy & Implementation (Preferable)

• GenAI Leadership: Experience in defining and leading the strategy for the learning, upskilling, and adoption of Generative AI capabilities across engineering and data teams.

• Foundational Scaling: Proven ability to build the technical foundations (architecture, tooling, integration patterns, observability, governance, and lifecycle management) required to responsibly scale GenAI solutions across an enterprise.

• Workflow Integration: Practical understanding of how to embed GenAI into core engineering and data workflows to improve developer productivity, knowledge access, support tooling, testing, and operational automation.

• Responsible AI Partnership: Experience partnering with Product, Data, Security, and Legal leaders to identify high-value GenAI use cases while ensuring solutions adhere to company standards for security, privacy, compliance, reliability, and responsible AI.

Governance, Financial, Budget & Service Ownership

• Experience managing and being accountable for significant technology operating and capital expenditure (OpEx/CapEx) budgets, including driving financial discipline and making ROI-based investment trade-offs.

• Direct experience in being ultimately accountable for the Service Reliability, Availability, Performance, and Scalability (RAPS) of mission-critical production services and data pipelines, specifically championing and embedding a strong Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) culture.

• Experience establishing security by design and leading security/cyber risk mitigation efforts across a large-scale technology portfolio.

• Experience with technology due diligence, post-acquisition integration, and scaling acquired teams and technology is preferable but not a must.