Why loveholidays?

At loveholidays, we’re on a mission to open the world to everyone, giving our customers unlimited choice, unmatched ease and unmissable value for their next holiday.

About the team

Engineering’s role underpins our vision to become the most loved OTA in Europe by providing a best-in-class experience to customers pre and post booking. Our systems process 675 billion holiday offers daily to help 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 600 times a month. Our CCAI-powered contact centre bot deals with 70% of all customer chat requests and in 2022 answered 1.4 million customer queries in less than 1 minute each.

In order to scale our platform at loveholidays, we have split it into four departments made up of cross functional product teams, all operating in an agile environment.

The Selling department is responsible for building our customer experience across web and native apps, and the APIs that underpin them. The focus is on optimising findability, conversion and margin. Selling teams generally own systems around the experience leading up to booking a holiday.

Our other departments are:

• Managing - the teams responsible for building products for customers and loveholidays contact centre agents across web and native apps and the APIs that underpin them, with a focus on optimising the post-booking customer experience and associated costs to the business

• Supplying - the teams responsible for hotel, flight and ancillary supplier integrations, including data ingestion and reservation API connectivity, with a focus on optimising breadth of choice, cost & availability accuracy and the successful fulfilment of holiday package components. Supplying teams own data and systems that are consumed by the rest of the business and ultimately by customers across the entire lifecycle of a holiday

• Scaling - the teams that provide systems and infrastructure that solve common technological problems to take advantage of the related economies of scale and increase the impact of technology expertise, forming the foundation systems are built on

About the role:

Reporting to the Director of Engineering, the Head of Engineering for Selling will:

• Set and implement the technical direction and vision of the Selling department consisting of our CRM, Packages and Search teams

• Scale high performing teams by applying our engineering principles

• Architect and lead the delivery and continuous improvement of

  • Customer focused, high performance websites

  • Bespoke low latency, scalable search and recommendation systems

  • Sophisticated real time revenue management systems

  • A CRM platform that scales to over 5 million customers

Your day-to-day:

• Engineering services at scale in the cloud

• Collaborating across product and technology teams to support, evolve and deliver our strategy

• Working closely with the Head of Product for Selling and Head of Product Design to manage and set the Selling platform strategy

• Engineer support and career development

• Managing the Selling engineering and infrastructure budget

• Continuously improving our engineer recruitment process

• Effectively communicating the Selling technical direction to stakeholders

• Continuously improving Selling teams’ technical KPIs (DORA metrics, infrastructure cost, etc)

• Researching 3rd party integrations and managing existing ones

Your skillset:

• A proven track record in mentoring, supporting and improving engineering teams

• Front end technologies

• Algorithms, data structures

• Performance, scalability

• Web services, REST, HTTP

• Containers, cloud

• Testing, reliability, monitoring

• Expertise in several programming languages and paradigms - our systems are written in TypeScript, Java, Golang, Rust, Python and others

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

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.