Senior Software Engineer, loveholidays

Checkout

Salary not provided
Kubernetes
TypeScript
GraphQL
Java
Rust
Prometheus
BigQuery
loki
Senior level
London

3+ days a week in office (Shortlands, London)

loveholidays

Holiday booking service

Open for applications

loveholidays

Holiday booking service

201-500 employees

B2CTravelLifestyle

Open for applications

Salary not provided
Kubernetes
TypeScript
GraphQL
Java
Rust
Prometheus
BigQuery
loki
Senior level
London

3+ days a week in office (Shortlands, London)

201-500 employees

B2CTravelLifestyle

Company mission

Loveholiday's mission is to create the ultimate online travel experience.

Role

Who you are

  • You are an experienced and motivated engineer who is excited about building products in cross functional teams to deliver a best-in-class buying experience to our consumers
  • You enjoy collaborating across teams to achieve shared goals, sharing knowledge with others. You consistently lead by example, and inspire and mentor up-and-coming engineers
  • You have proven experience in building scalable and high-performance applications, employing cutting edge algorithms, data modelling, software design and technologies to do so
  • Applying a product mindset, you solve for end users first, with technology being a means to an end
  • You have a constant interest in learning more about the latest trends in the wider industry, and want to grow further. We strive to support engineers in their growth and will give you the platform to do it
  • You own applications end to end, from specification to coding, to deploying, running and monitoring in production with tools such as Prometheus and Loki

Desirable

  • You’ve worked in a team with a “you build it, you run it” ethos before
  • You have extensive experience working in at least one of our team’s core languages/frameworks. We are looking for strong engineers who are keen to learn and grow their full stack skills
  • You are a product engineer, interested in solving business problems and see technology as a means to an end

What the job involves

  • The Checkout team owns a crucial part of the customer experience when booking their perfect holiday. We own and optimise a checkout platform that is responsible for providing customers with ease and choice when customising their package holiday, as well as providing exhaustive data insights to the business on user and platform behaviour
  • Engineers on the team are responsible for leading product and technical initiatives, helping to ideate and build experiments, and mentoring others in their areas of expertise
  • Extending and optimising our checkout platform, integrating with live supplier APIs during checkout to provide the best choice to our customers
  • Building server driven UIs that can be changed without engineering involvement to enable different parts of the business to optimise the platform
  • Work across our stack - from optimising the ultra-fast performance of our app, to deploying GraphQL changes, to working with BigQuery and our Data Mesh, to rolling out new services to serve our customers like hotel recommendations
  • The team primarily uses Preact, Typescript, GraphQL, Node, and Java. However we employ many different languages across our teams and encourage engineers to work across the entire stack and use the right tool for the job - from our Kubernetes infrastructure to our Rust edge platform

Application process

  • 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

Salary benchmarks

Our take

Travel, both domestic and overseas, has been a huge part of the British economy since the late 20th century. In 2019, UK residents spent £43 billion on foreign holidays - almost double the amount spent a decade before.

Despite travel companies suffering considerable reputation damage back in 2020, as they struggled to refund customers whose booked holidays were suddenly cancelled, the appeal of companies like loveholidays to holidaymakers will undoubtedly endure seeing as they make the process of booking holidays much easier.

In the nearest future, loveholidays will need to focus on maintaining its reputation, especially given the wide array of direct competitors who could steal market share. At present, however, loveholidays is still one of the fastest growing online travel agents. If it can keep up the practices which have brought it success over the past 10 years, loveholidays is still in a good position to keep its growth strong for few years to come.

Kirsty headshot

Kirsty

Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle

Insights

Some candidates hear
back within 2 weeks

44% female employees

39% employee growth in 12 months

Company

Employee endorsements

Opportunities to learn

"The company has made a deliberate decision to invest in great engineers and give us the autonomy and accountability to pick the best tool for the..."

Funding (2 rounds)

Oct 2016

$3.9m

EARLY VC

May 2011

$2.6m

EARLY VC

Total funding: $6.5m

Company benefits

  • Discounted holidays for you, your family and friends
  • 25 days of annual leave + bank holidays
  • Company pension contributions at 5%
  • Individual training budget for courses, seminars and memberships to professional bodies
  • High degree of autonomy in a strong collaborative environment
  • Cycle to work scheme, season ticket loan and eye care vouchers
  • Hybrid working with 3 days working in our office (London) and 2 days WFH per week
  • Sustainably sourced fruit baskets in the office kitchen
  • Increased annual leave for long service
  • Ability to buy and sell annual leave
  • Enhanced maternity pay = 6 weeks of full pay and 20 weeks at 50% pay
  • Enhanced paternity pay = 4 weeks of full pay

Company values

  • We are entrepreneurs - We’re proudly commercial, we do more with less, we own the decisions we make and the actions we take
  • Everything is written in pencil - As we grow, we think smaller, act quicker and continuously evolve the way we organise our work
  • We organise for speed - A flat structure with small teams, allows us to move quickly
  • We believe in Team - We’re all in it together

Company HQ

Hammersmith, London, UK

Leadership

Jonny Marsh

(Non Executive Director)

An engineering graduate from the University of Bath, Jonny is also the founder and ex-CEO of nmqa Ltd and co-founder of travelmatch. He served as Loveholiday's COO until 2019.

Alex Francis

(Non Executive Director)

Founded travelmatch in 2007 and then loveholidays in 2012, quickly becoming the fastest growing business in the UK by 2019. Now acting as a non-exec for the business since stepping down as CEO in 2020.


People progressing

Joined as UX/Design Manager in 2011, promoted 3 times in 10 years to current position of Lead User Researcher, having previously worked as Senior Product Designer.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at loveholidays

Clodagh Beatty headshot

Clodagh Beatty (Head of Talent Management, Learning & DE&I)

  • We recently hired a Head of L&D, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion to support us in our ongoing commitments to creating an inclusive environment, as well as providing growth opportunities for all our employees
  • We want all applicants to feel they can belong at loveholidays
  • We have employees from all walks of life and we are only interested in assessing your skills, attitude and talent!
  • We support Employee Resource Groups - recently launched our Women's Network at loveholidays

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