Principal Software Engineer - Product Engineering

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 getaway. Our team is the driving force behind our role as our customers’ personal holiday expert - the smart way to get away.

About the team

Engineering at loveholidays 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 trillions of holiday offers daily to help millions of customers find their perfect holiday. Our website serves thousands of requests per second backed by services hosted on GCP, to which we deploy more than a thousand times a month.

We actively talk about technology and adhere to our key technology principles that have guided us this far. We are growing and have ambitious plans to expand across Europe leveraging the best minds and technology to let us do this.

The impact you’ll have:

Performance, accessibility, scalability and a leading UX are all incredibly important to us at loveholidays. We regularly spend time looking at how to make things better for our customers (and for ourselves) through new technologies and pushing the boundaries of front-end engineering, such as pioneering adoption of web components. If the questions below resonate with you, then this could be your next role:

• Do you care about the p95 render-to-string millisecond performance of Preact?
• Have you been frustrated with how inaccessible sites are and wish that we went back to the basics and do that really well?
• Do you contribute to open source?
• Does the efficiency of design systems and how to implement them fascinate you?
• Is perf.now() a conference you love to attend or would love to attend?

Our website is one of the fastest in the industry, because we have asked ourselves all those questions and wanted better answers to them than what was out there. As a Principal Software Engineer with a focus on web performance, accessibility, scalable front-ends and design systems, you will ensure our teams continuously evolve and optimise the front end architecture that establishes us as industry leaders

If you don’t believe us, you can see for yourself through our blogs posts:

• [https://tech.loveholidays.com/when-stroopwafels-meet-cutting-edge-tech-rum-and-compression-dictionaries-from-performance-now-eb05de8fff67>
• [https://tech.loveholidays.com/phrasebook-a-performance-optimised-translation-library-d9762fa7ed72>
• [https://tech.loveholidays.com/improving-web-performance-lessons-and-insights-from-loveholidays-fe0bdb776519>
• [https://tech.loveholidays.com/from-manual-grind-to-automated-bliss-introducing-preact-perf-metrics-d37ce188532b>

Or our open source contributions:

• [https://github.com/preactjs/preact-render-to-string/pull/335>
• [https://github.com/preactjs/preact-render-to-string/pull/334>
• [https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse-ci/pull/501>

Your day-to-day:

You will be responsible for:

Champion and evolve a performance culture across all engineering teams - We blog about performance regularly and will expect you to as well.

• Technical Strategy: Develop and execute a comprehensive roadmap for building our next generation front-end platforms - leveraging the latest technologies and tools to deliver an accessible, performant and incredibly experience for our customers
• UX Consistency: Work with design and engineering teams to ensure performance optimisations do not negatively impact the user experience, and that a consistent UX is maintained across all products and services.
• Team Development: Mentor and guide engineering teams to achieve excellence in web vitals, web application latency, scalability and reliability
• External Advocacy: Promote loveholidays' performance culture through activities like blogging and conference presentations
• Vendor Management: Build and maintain strong relationships with key technology vendors to ensure access to the latest performance solutions

Your skillset:

• Proven Experience: A track record of building and optimising scalable, high-performance websites.
• Technical Expertise: Deep understanding of web performance engineering principles, algorithms, software design, and relevant technologies (e.g. CDNs, WAFs, Edge Computing).
• Ability to inspire and empower engineering teams to deliver exceptional results.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills to effectively collaborate with diverse stakeholders, including product designers and product managers.
• A focus on solving user problems and delivering business value through technology.
• Product design and UX Awareness: Understanding of user experience principles and the ability to balance performance optimizations with user needs.

Desirable

• Fastly, Edge Compute platform
• Preact or other front-end frameworks
• Rust (we use this for our edge platforms)
• GCP

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.

The interview journey:

• Intro to loveholidays with our Talent Team
• Intro with VP of Engineering (Face to face or virtual)
• 1 hour Technical case study presentation with CTO, CPO, VP, Head or Principal (in office), 1 hour systems architecture interview with 2 Principal Engineers