Principal Engineer - Service Delivery/IX Platform
Sabre · Kraków
Powering the agentic revolution in travel. Sabre is an AI-native technology leader, backed by one of the world’s largest travel data clouds. Built on an open, modular, cloud-native architecture, Sabre serves as the backbone for both established leaders and bold, new disruptors, guiding them to the next age of travel retailing through intelligent, connected, and personalized experiences. With AI at its core and operating at unparalleled scale, Sabre transforms insights into innovation, empowering airlines, hoteliers, agencies and other partners to retail, distribute and fulfill travel worldwide.
We are seeking an Engineer to join our global IX Platform team, where innovation knows no borders. This role is part of a larger transition and a dedicated team being created in Kraków. This team designs, builds, and evolves modern cloud-native backend services and distributed architectures that power mission-critical travel and airline technology solutions worldwide. By delivering high-availability systems, robust APIs, and scalable data flows, the team enables travel disruptors and established leaders to retail, distribute, and fulfill travel at scale. With an inclusive culture and flexible work environment, we work together with boldness, curiosity, and commitment so we can all win together.
As an Engineer on the IX Platform team in Kraków, you will build and support resilient microservices, messaging patterns, and cloud-native backend components. You will collaborate across Product, Architecture, QA, SRE, and Delivery teams to translate platform vision into production-ready software. Takes ownership of services from design through implementation, deployment, and production support. This role demands strong backend engineering fundamentals, a commitment to clean code, and constructive problem-solving to maintain high reliability across enterprise distributed systems.
What You'll Do
- Service Lifecycle: Take ownership of services from design through implementation, deployment, and production support.
- Backend Engineering: Design, develop, test, and maintain high-performance backend services using Java and modern JDK capabilities.
- API Development: Build, consume, and document secure, well-structured RESTful and SOAP APIs and integration services for high-availability systems.
- Cloud Operations: Deploy and operate containerized microservices in cloud environments, focusing on Google Cloud Platform, GKE, Cloud Run, and automated deployment patterns.
- Distributed Systems: Implement asynchronous, event-driven communication patterns using messaging technologies, queues, and event streams.
- Data Management: Optimize relational database schemas, SQL queries, transactions, caching mechanisms, and data access layers for consistency and scale.
- Quality & Code Health: Author production-quality code with unit and integration tests, participate in code reviews, and drive continuous engineering improvements.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with cross-functional teams to refine technical requirements, evaluate design trade-offs, and support operational readiness through logging, monitoring, and incident diagnostics.
What You'll Bring
Required Qualifications
- Strong hands-on experience with Java backend development, modern JDK versions, JVM fundamentals, concurrency, and performance tuning.
- Proven experience designing, developing, consuming, and maintaining REST and SOAP APIs, including API security, contracts, and versioning.
- Practical experience with cloud-native architectures and containerization tools such as Docker, Kubernetes, or Google Cloud Platform services.
- Solid understanding of distributed systems principles, microservices patterns, service discovery, resiliency, messaging systems (e.g., Pub/Sub, Kafka, RabbitMQ), and key resilience/consistency mechanisms including retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, idempotency, consistency, latency, and failure handling.
- Hands-on experience with relational databases, SQL schema design, query optimization, data modeling, and modern CI/CD practices.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, or similar Java backend frameworks.
- Hands-on experience with GCP-native services such as GKE, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Memorystore, Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Trace, or Cloud Build.
- Experience with Kafka or high-volume event streaming platforms.
- Experience designing systems for high availability, horizontal scaling, disaster recovery, and performance under load.
- Experience with OpenAPI/Swagger, API gateways, OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, mTLS, enterprise identity integrations, or NoSQL/caching technologies like PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, Redis, or Elasticsearch.
- Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform or Helm.
- Domain experience in travel, airline, retailing, distribution, booking, or fulfillment enterprise systems.
Work arrangements
- Hybrid working mode; 3 chosen days from the office in a week
- Flexible working hours: Maintain your work-life balance by adjusting your working hours to your needs
Paid time off
- Year-End-Break: enjoy additional fully paid days off during the last week of the year
- Paid parental leave: Take up to 12 weeks off with pay after birth or adoption of a child. Sabre Global Paid Parental Leave runs concurrently with local leave policies.
- Paid volunteer time: take up to 4 days annually to give your time to a charitable organization of your choice
Your money
- My Benefit platform/Multisport card: enjoy the benefit cafeteria system and use popular sport card
- Tax deduction: take the opportunity to claim deductible costs, reducing your income tax
- Employee Capital Plans: profit from long-term saving scheme co-financed by Sabre and the State Treasury
- Baby Bonus: benefit from one-time allowance on childbirth or adoption
- Say Thanks program: collect points on recognition program and transfer them to wide variety of gifts and services
Health and wellness
- Luxmed medical coverage: take care of yourself and your family with the extensive medical package with a broad range of additional services
- Foreign travel insurance: feel safe going abroad with free Allianz insurance offered as part of our Lux Med package
- Employee Assistance Program: find help in free, confidential program with a certified counselor
- Mindfulness & meditation apps: take care of your mental and physical health
- Life insurance: sign up for free, high coverage life insurance program
Career development
- Professional development: access to e-learning platforms as well as join Sabre live learning sessions
- Certification and tuition reimbursement
- Our Communities: join one of our team member groups focused on sharing knowledge and best practices (Google Developers Group, Innovation Lab Community, Women in Technology, SOLVE!T and many more)
And more
- Car and bike parking
- Fun & Relax zone in modern office: enjoy electronic tables to work, foosball, ping pong, pool table, swings, massage chairs and terraces to admire a panoramic view of Kraków. We have parents’ rooms as well
- No dress code
- Innovation Lab: access Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality equipment, Robot construction kit, 3D printers and many more
- Attractive Referral Bonus: earn $2500 USD for every hired referral
We will give careful consideration to your application and review your details against the position criteria. You will receive separate notification as we progress your application.
Please note that only candidates who meet the minimum requirements will proceed in the selection process.
Sabre is an equal employment opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.
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