Head of Engineering

Salary: from £70,000 DOE (plus benefits)

As Head of Engineering at Holiday Extras you will play a key role in solving some of the most exciting and challenging problems the travel industry has right now. The biggest one is how we remove the unnecessary hassle from travelling so our customers can make the most of their precious holiday time - in fact, the whole reason why we exist.

We believe all the answers lie in creating pioneering tech for our customers.

This is where you come in…

We're looking for a Head of Engineering (who loves to travel as much as we do!) to lead on technology decisions and continue our move to microservices and API based architecture.

You will work closely with the Associate Director of Technology on our technology roadmap making sure it delivers and supports the future growth of the Holiday Extras business.

In this exciting time for travel, we're on a mission to remake holidaymaking. So we're on the search for people who would relish working across multiple streams of work, designing and influencing architectural decisions and providing direction for the team inline with our strategic roadmap.

Our current streams of work include:

  • Intelligent Recommendations - Creating and developing data models with our data science team to create a super intelligent recommendation engine. Leveraging data we have about our customers, their trips and the travel market to create customer value in HEHA! (our Holiday Extras, Holiday Assistant).
  • Service - Making it easy for our customers to self-serve on our site and app by providing a first-class chat experience that uses Machine Learning to present fast, automated-responses. Our goal is to have the best chat experience online where customers get their queries answered swiftly and when needed can connect with a member of our service team either via chat or over the phone if required.
  • Supply - Connecting with our supply partners to deliver the best product, price and availability. We integrate with multiple partners who are at different stages of their tech journey. We're currently building out our best-in-class integration strategy overcoming challenges of storing and presenting millions of prices across multiple product types. Focus is on speed and accuracy.
  • Moving all traffic to our most performant booking platform - We call it the Trip App; our modern Single Page web application built with React. We are constantly empowering our engineers to use the best and latest tech and coding standards. Trip App has a good use of code-splitting, hooks, redux, great test coverage and more. This gives our customers the most seamless experience and our developers the best possible coding environment to work with.

    Our CEO and Associate Director of Technology on why you should choose a tech career at Holiday Extras

Our tech stack

By using and developing pioneering technologies, we believe in providing value to our customers as fast as possible, deploying several hundreds times a day.

Our architecture consists of APIs structured as microservices hosted on the Google Cloud Platform.

  • React / React Router / Redux / Reselect
  • Webpack / Parcel to bundle code
  • Babel to support modern JavaScript in old browsers
  • Selenium for end-to-end testing
  • ESLint / Prettier for code formatting
  • Mocha / Jest / Enzyme for unit testing
  • Less / SASS / Bootstrap / Atomic design / BEM
  • NodeJS on the backend with Express
  • GraphQL and REST for APIs
  • Microservices hosted in Google Cloud using Kubernetes
  • MySQL for operational Database and GBQ for Data Lake
  • Python and Airflow for data processing

Find out more about our tech stack.

Let your career take flight

As leaders it's our responsibility to create and set the tone for our culture, doing so with intention to curate meaningful and impactful experiences for our team.

To support our ongoing leadership development we have recently launched our Leadership framework which defines the behaviours needed to create an inclusive environment, aligned to our values where all can thrive. Through self evaluation, 360 feedback and one to ones, we create our own development plans and check in regularly on how we're doing. We review performance throughout the year, all our roles and salaries are benchmarked externally. To support your progression you will have the opportunity to discuss your performance and what's required to develop to the next level.

Want to work abroad? No problem. Need part-time hours? Let us know what you'd like that to look like.

Remote working has been hardwired into our way of life for a long time, but we also have some amazing hubs you can access: in Kent (near the beaches in Hythe and the up-and-coming coastal town of Folkestone), Birmingham and Maidenhead.

Apply now if you have...

  • Experience of implementing sound engineering practices delivering reliable, scalable and robust software.
  • Proven success in delivery of complex software & infrastructure projects.
  • Experience of leading teams in a technology business including working and leading remote or outsourced engineering teams.
  • An ability to coach, mentor and set clear expectations to all areas and people you manage. Able to have difficult conversations when needed in order to achieve the right outcomes for all.
  • A strong leadership capability; a great communicator giving context and clarity enabling teams to deliver and able to make decisions and act quickly when needed
  • A pragmatic approach to software delivery, understanding the benefits of shipping customer value early and often.
  • Strong collaboration skills with a range of people and teams - not afraid to challenge (with good intent and approach) and listen to find the best solutions for our customers and partners.
  • Experience in influencing and steering at all levels in order to make the best decisions, and are comfortable managing up as well as managing down.
  • Good understanding across all areas of a business and can contribute at a senior level to discussions and strategic planning.

Apply now if you want...

  • A workplace culture that enables you to make the most of your time - both in and out of work.
  • A team you can learn from and who can learn from you.
  • A wider community of amazing people who are rooting for you and have your back.
  • The ability to choose where and when you work.
  • 25 days holiday
  • Birthday day off
  • Enhanced parental leave
  • Pension
  • Private medical insurance and health screening
  • Life assurance
  • Income protection
  • Employee assistance programme
  • Cycle-to-work schemes
  • Electric car scheme
  • Onsite fitness classes

Sound good? Here's the next steps...

Upload your CV and we'll be in touch!

Or if you'd like to have a chat first, please get in contact via [email protected].

Apply Now

How we hire

You'll be invited to a video call with Simon Wood, our Associate Director of Technology.

We'll get back to you with feedback and hopefully invite you to a half day remote or onsite pairing session, working through some coding and PRs with members of the team. Followed by a panel interview with people from our tech and leadership teams.

As with our work, we move fast and make it clear of what's expected at each stage - supporting you all the way.

Holiday Extras Tech Logo

Join us and help us remake holidaymaking.