Alibek Datbayev
-Alibek
What attracted you to work at your company? How did you know it would be a good fit?
A couple of things made it easy for me to join Booking.com. First and foremost is that I love traveling—it’s always exciting! Building products for millions of travelers while being myself a huge fan of exploring the world, is a privilege for me. Another reason is working in Amsterdam. I fell in love with it from first sight when I came for the on-site interview. As a big logistical hub, Amsterdam has direct connections with entire Europe, so you can easily get pretty much anywhere. For me personally this was a great deal as I wanted to see many places.
What are you responsible for in your current role?
Today I am an engineering manager of a team called App Trip XP. We build screens on iOS and Android that allow our customers to manage their trips. My primary responsibilities include managing software engineers, setting up processes to successfully run the team, provide higher level technical guidance, stakeholder management with product counterparts, conflict resolution, and performance and promotion management.
What are you working on right now that excites or inspires you?
Our entire track is one of the core pieces of the company strategy called “Connected Trip”, and that is really exciting as it means we’re at the forefront of new things. Our org structure changes, architecture, and design language modernizations that were led by track tech, product, and UX leaders have been great initiatives that enable us to deliver platforms and features that end up being awesome products for our customers.
What do you value most about your company’s or team’s culture? What sets it apart from other places you’ve worked?
We have five really simple values and I know them all by heart! They do genuinely click with me, I love them and it’s easy to use them on a daily basis in decision making. I’d love to highlight the “Learn Forever” and really say that Booking.com has always been great with providing learning tools. My favorite is O’Reilly Learning (formerly Safari Online). The fact that you get access to the entire O’Reilly library is just mind blowing as it’s an unlimited mine of knowledge.
What’s one thing you would want a candidate to know about what it’s like to work at your company?
As someone who was growing up with Eastern mentality, it was hard for me to adapt that it is OK to challenge your management. It is super healthy to challenge upper management at Booking.com (as long as you have the data to prove yourself).
Tell us about an innovation at your company that was especially exciting and why. How does your company help employees innovate?
I love hackathons, and it’s great Booking.com loves them too! We built the first version of our Booking Assistant during a hackathon. We used the Telegram API in a couple of days and built a small project that was integrated with our internal system. Later on we built an entire system that connects our guests, partners, and customer service. And the fact that it was built from scratch up to being by millions of customers is really inspiring as Booking.com supports innovation and new trends.
Meet Other Booking.com Employees
Naomi Generoso Faustino
Data Analyst
Naomi helps partners services track and steer operational performance in the human channel. For that, she builds and maintains data pipelines to feed reports used by Booking.com’s local offices.
Francesco Pierfederici
Principal Software Engineer I
Francesco helps unblock engineering teams and make sure that they are aligned with the company vision in their architecture and technology choices. He also helps them with architecture reviews, requirements gathering, and general development work.