Senior AI Application Software Engineer (For independent contractors)

At Booking.com, the CBO Office supports strategic and operational execution across the Chief Business Officer organisation, working across CBO departments and corporate functions. It brings together Business Operations, Change Management and Program Management to help the organisation prioritise, plan and govern major initiatives, enable business change and improve cross-functional delivery. We are looking for a senior engineer to architect and develop AI-powered, agentic solutions across these three disciplines.

Today, we have a collection of AI use cases and early solutions. The ambition is to evolve these into a coherent and scalable product ecosystem rather than a collection of disconnected AI applications, identifying common technical capabilities that can be reused across workflows while supporting the specific needs of each craft. The engineer will help determine the right architecture for this ecosystem, including how agents, shared services, enterprise knowledge and data, and existing systems can progressively work together through agentic and multi-agent solutions.

We are looking for someone with a strong Software Engineering and solution architecture background, combined with hands-on experience developing GenAI and agentic applications. The person should have practical experience building agents and multi-agent workflows using platforms such as OpenAI/ChatGPT and Anthropic/Claude. Experience with MCP/tool integrations, RAG and grounding, context management, agent orchestration, APIs, evaluation, observability, guardrails and human-in-the-loop patterns is particularly relevant.

The engineer should be comfortable using AI-assisted development tools such as Codex and Claude Code and be able to take solutions from rapid prototypes to secure, reliable, maintainable and production-ready applications, rather than focusing only on experimentation. The engineer will work closely with the Product Manager, programme lead, domain experts and Booking.com technology teams to translate product requirements into technical designs and working solutions.

Experience with Project and Program Management workflows and enterprise productivity systems such as Jira, Confluence, Google Workspace and Slack is valuable. This is primarily an AI application and architecture role, not an ML research role. The focus is on applying existing AI models and enterprise platforms to real business workflows rather than training foundation models.

Key responsibilities include: architecting, building and productionising AI-powered applications, agents and multi-agent workflows; translating business needs and product requirements into technical designs, prototypes and production-ready solutions; identifying and building reusable capabilities and common patterns across use cases and crafts; designing agent orchestration, retrieval/grounding, context and state management, tool calling and MCP-based integrations; integrating solutions with relevant enterprise knowledge, data and systems through approved APIs and platforms; implementing appropriate evaluation, observability, guardrails, access controls and human-in-the-loop mechanisms; owning solutions end-to-end, including code quality, testing, security, deployment, monitoring, reliability and documentation; rapidly prototyping and evaluating technologies and architectures to validate feasibility and inform technical decisions; working with Booking.com technology, platform and security teams to align with enterprise standards and avoid isolated solutions; and contributing to the technical roadmap and operating model required to maintain, support and scale the solutions.

These responsibilities fit well with the Booking.com SWE framework's emphasis on end-to-end ownership, software-system design and architectural guidance, including evaluating architecture against business and technology requirements and designing for future evolution.

Required skills and experience: minimum 5 years of professional experience as a Software Engineer, ideally in backend, full-stack, application or platform engineering; strong software architecture and system-design experience; hands-on experience building GenAI and agentic applications, ideally in production; practical experience with AI agents and orchestration, preferably including multi-agent systems; experience with OpenAI/ChatGPT, Anthropic/Claude or comparable LLM platforms; experience with MCP/tool calling, APIs and enterprise system integrations; experience with RAG, retrieval, grounding, context engineering and state/memory management; experience with AI evaluation, observability, guardrails and human-in-the-loop patterns; strong application-development experience, ideally with Python and/or TypeScript/JavaScript; strong software-engineering fundamentals including testing, APIs, security, CI/CD, monitoring, version control and production operations; experience taking solutions from prototype/PoC to reliable, maintainable production software; and the ability to work effectively with Product Managers, business stakeholders, domain experts and technical teams.

Desirable experience: experience designing multi-agent or agent-as-tool architectures; experience with Claude Code, Codex or comparable agentic development tools; enterprise knowledge/search and productivity systems, including Jira, Confluence, Google Workspace and Slack; Project/Program Management, Change Management or Business Operations workflows; experience building AI solutions that can take actions in external systems, including appropriate permission and approval controls; and experience in large-scale, privacy-sensitive or regulated enterprise environments.

This role is not primarily a Data Engineering, Data Science or Machine Learning research role. The core requirement is a strong Software Engineer and architect who can apply existing AI capabilities to real enterprise workflows, integrate them with enterprise systems and take them into secure, reliable and maintainable production.