Staff Software Engineer, loveholidays
3+ days a week in office
Holiday booking service
Be an early applicant
Holiday booking service
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
3+ days a week in office
201-500 employees
Company mission
Loveholiday's mission is to create the ultimate online travel experience.
Role
Who you are
- You have proven experience in building scalable and high-performance applications, employing cutting edge algorithms, software design and technologies to do so
- You enjoy collaborating with other engineers through pair programming
- Observability
- Web services, REST, HTTP
- Containers, cloud
- Testing, reliability, monitoring
- Strong knowledge in building and owning application end-to-end, from inception to maintenance, to retirement
- Designing systems that scale
- Expertise in some of our main programming languages - TypeScript, Java, Golang, Rust, Python
Desirable
- You have extensive experience coding in Go and Java
- You are someone who can identify repetitive processes and transform them into automated solutions using LLMs, or build custom tools and integrations through code to unlock new efficiencies and opportunities
- You have experience deploying applications in Kubernetes through Google Cloud
- You are comfortable using BigQuery to analyse data to help identify areas of opportunity within the team
- You have knowledge and understanding of the travel sector
What the job involves
- Supplier integration systems that process vast amounts of data
- Industry leading bespoke, high performance search and recommendation systems
- Sophisticated real time pricing systems
- Complex domain modelling and implementation of booking payment, fulfilment and management systems
- AI-powered solutions to assist customers pre and post booking
- Best in class, modern user experience through web and mobile applications
- As part of our tech culture we continuously improve our time to delivery, reducing errors and generally leaving things better than you found them
- Adoption of our engineering principles
- Building and running services at scale in the cloud
- Collaborating with engineers, designers, product managers within and outside of the team
- Implementing maintainable and well tested solutions iteratively, keeping business impact and observability as a primary focus
- Understanding the wider context of the business and designing system architectures that meet short and long term business goals
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
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
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
$4.1m
EARLY VC
May 2011
$2.8m
EARLY VC
Total funding: $6.9m
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
Articles
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 (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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