Lead Software Engineer

Why loveholidays?

The work we do in engineering underpins our vision to become the most loved OTA (Online Travel Agent) in Europe, providing a best-in-class experience for our customers pre- and post-booking. We work using our engineering principles in highly-aligned, autonomous cross functional product teams and own the customer journey.

We are always looking to push the boundaries of what we can do with technology to drive an incredible customer experience. Our systems process 755 billion holiday offers every day, helping millions of customers find their perfect holiday. Our website serves 7,500 requests per second, backed by more than 100 services hosted on GCP to which we deploy 1500 times a month.

About the team

The Selling department at loveholidays is launching a full-stack team to take responsibility for the “search” portion of our customer journey. This involves working on our customers’ first impressions on our landing pages, providing an excellent user experience when filtering our search results to find the perfect holiday, and ultimately helping customers reach our checkout experience.

We are looking for an experienced and motivated Lead Software Engineer to lead the team to success.

What you'll be working on:

• Extending and optimising our industry leading search platform, responsible for serving millions of offers to users, backed by processing billions of offers each day.

• Expanding on our cutting edge Preact web application and GraphQL layer to provide meaningful features to millions of users searching for their perfect holiday.

• Using Prometheus, Loki and Tempo and others to build robust monitoring and reliability practices for the services your team owns.

• Using BigQuery to analyse performance data such as Web Vitals or building data products as part of our Data Mesh.

• Our teams are encouraged to use the right tool for the right job. We program in TypeScript, Java, Go, Rust, others.

• Line management, career development, and recruitment for your team.

• Effectively communicating your team’s technical direction to stakeholders.

Your skillset:

• You have proven experience in building scalable and high-performance applications, employing cutting edge algorithms, software design and technologies to do so

• You own applications end to end, from specification to coding, to deploying, running and monitoring in production.

• You have a proven track record in mentoring, supporting and measurably improving engineering teams.

• You collaborate across teams to achieve shared goals, sharing knowledge with others.

• You lead by example, inspiring engineers within your team and the broader organisation.

• Applying a product mindset, you solve for end users first working, with technology being a means to an end.

Perks of joining us:

• Company pension contributions at 5%.

• Individualised training budget for you to learn on the job and level yourself up.

• Discounted holidays for you, your family and friends.

• 25 days of holidays per annum (plus 8 public holidays) increases by 1 day for every second year of service, up to a maximum 30 days per annum.

• Ability to buy and sell annual leave.

• Cycle to work scheme, season ticket loan and eye care vouchers.

The interview journey:

• 1st stage interview with two engineers from the team.

• Tech challenge - you can choose between a live and take home option.

• Final stage - consisting of discussions around three key areas.

At loveholidays, we focus on developing an inclusive culture and environment that encourages personal growth and collective success. Each individual offers unique perspectives and ideas that increase the diversity and effectiveness of our teams. And we value the insight and potential you could bring on our continued journey.