Software Engineer II – Geo Intelligence (Marketplace) (For Independent contractors)

About the team: Geo Intelligence is the team behind Booking.com's geo-intelligence platform. We deliver trusted geographic data, routing and spatial models through APIs that power search, relevance, maps, partner onboarding and compliance across Booking.com products. Our platform is used by teams across the company and covers places and points of interest, administrative and regulatory boundaries, location matching, routing (travel times and distances) and spatial ranking models.

We are evolving it into a dependable, self-serve geo product: a highly reliable read path with clear service levels, governed ownership of core geo data, a single entry point for internal and external geo data, and new capabilities such as route-aware search, itinerary building blocks and AI-ready geo data.

The role: A Software Engineer II in Geo Intelligence owns the execution of technical elements in our geo platform, its data pipelines and the processes around them. They implement technical solutions based on business requirements from product, ML and compliance consumers, can estimate the effort and impact of the items they work on, and show a high quality of craft in what they deliver. A Software Engineer II understands that the quality of test automation is as important as the production code, and spends time refactoring both to ensure ease of change and a sustainable pace of development.

This matters in a domain where a wrong boundary, relation or location assignment propagates to search, partner and compliance processes downstream. Software Engineer IIs work together with product managers, data scientists, geo analysts and engineers in consuming teams to design, prioritise and implement technical tasks. The work spans geo APIs and services, data pipelines and imports, migrations off legacy systems, infrastructure automation, tooling and internal exploration tools.

Key responsibilities: Building software applications: build and evolve geo services (e.g. geo data, search, routing and geocoding APIs) using Java and modern service frameworks, applying knowledge of geospatial systems, services and tools; write readable and reusable code by applying standard patterns and libraries, including for spatial queries, geometry handling and relationships between geo objects; refactor and simplify code by introducing design patterns when necessary, including as part of modernising existing services; ensure application quality by following standard testing techniques that adhere to the test strategy, including data validation for geo datasets and API contract tests; maintain data security, integrity and quality by following company standards and geo-data governance practices.

End-to-end system ownership: own a geo service end to end: monitor health, latency, availability and data freshness, set and track relevant service levels, and act when they are violated; reduce business continuity risk and bus factor by applying good practices and tools and writing runbooks and operational documentation for services and pipelines; reduce risk and gather consumer feedback by using continuous delivery and experimentation frameworks; independently manage a service through deployment and operations in production, including publishing data to downstream consumers.

Technical incident management: address and resolve live production issues, such as incorrect geo data, wrong location assignments or API degradation, by mitigating customer and partner impact within SLA; improve the reliability of geo systems by producing long-term solutions through root cause analysis; contribute to postmortems and log live issues, including escalations from consuming teams.

Architectural guidance: advise consuming teams on how to integrate with geo data and APIs correctly, instead of direct database access, local copies or duplicated geo logic, by explaining the wider architectural landscape; contribute to the technical direction of geo capabilities by evaluating target architecture improvements and explaining design decisions to varied stakeholders.

Software systems design: evaluate architecture solutions for geo capabilities, taking into account cost, consumer requirements, data quality, latency and third-party data providers; describe the implications of changing an existing system or adding a new one, with a broad understanding of the geo platform's infrastructure, data flows and legacy dependencies; help grow the business or accelerate development through prototyping, spiking and vendor evaluation, for example benchmarking internal geo data against external providers; design solutions that meet current requirements and are adaptable to future needs such as route-aware search, itinerary building blocks, spatial indexing and AI-ready geo data.

Critical thinking: systematically identify patterns and underlying issues in complex situations, such as data-quality problems that surface far from their source, and solve them with logical and analytical thinking; constructively evaluate ideas, plans and solutions, take external knowledge into account, initiate SMART improvements and explain the reasoning behind them. Continuous quality and process improvement: identify opportunities for process, system and structural improvements (e.g. performance gains, reducing manual data changes, removing legacy dependencies) by examining current flows, methods and standards; design and implement improvements such as governed change processes for geo data, automated validation and self-serve onboarding for consumers; maintain data security, integrity and quality by following company standards and good practices, and guide more junior team members on these topics.

Effective communication: deliver clear, well-structured information to technical and non-technical audiences, such as product teams, data scientists, legal and compliance, using suitable channels and language; reach mutually agreeable solutions with consuming teams by staying adaptable, communicating ideas clearly and practising active listening; ask relevant follow-up questions to fully understand consumer needs and the business context behind a geo request.

What we're looking for: solid experience building and operating backend services in Java (or another JVM language), with production experience in REST APIs and relational databases; experience with distributed systems and data flows, e.g. event streaming, search engines and cloud data platforms; strong testing, observability and operational habits; comfort working with data quality: validating, reconciling and reasoning about large datasets.

Nice to have: Spring Boot, Python, spatial databases, spatial indexing systems (e.g. H3/S2), or experience with platform or API products used by many internal teams. This role may require being part of an on-call rotation.