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.
Job Summary
We are looking for an experienced Lead Software Engineer to lead the design and development of scalable, secure, and highly available enterprise applications and middleware services and airline domain experience
The ideal candidate will have strong hands-on expertise in Java, Spring Boot, Microservices, REST APIs, Middleware/Integration technologies, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The role requires a combination of technical leadership, architecture/design ownership, hands-on development, troubleshooting, and mentoring.
The engineer will work closely with architects, product owners, engineering teams, DevOps/SRE, and dependent systems to deliver reliable cloud-native solutions.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership & Architecture
- Lead technical design and implementation of Java/Spring Boot-based microservices and middleware applications.
- Translate business and functional requirements into scalable technical solutions using AI
- Define service boundaries, API contracts, integration patterns, and application architecture.
- Conduct design and code reviews and establish engineering best practices.
- Evaluate technical trade-offs around scalability, performance, resiliency, maintainability, and cost.
- Provide technical direction to engineers and mentor junior and mid-level developers.
- Drive technical discussions across dependent application and platform teams.
Java & Microservices AI Development
- Design and develop production-grade applications using Java 17/21, Spring Boot, Spring Framework, and Spring Cloud.
- Build and maintain RESTful APIs and event-driven services.
- Implement microservice patterns including:
- API Gateway
- Circuit Breaker
- Retry/Timeout
- Service Discovery
- Distributed configuration
- Event-driven architecture
- Idempotency
- Caching
- Distributed tracing
- Apply appropriate design patterns and SOLID principles.
- Develop effective unit, integration, component, and contract tests using tools such as JUnit, Mockito, WireMock, and Testcontainers.
Middleware & Integration
- Design integrations between enterprise applications using REST, JSON, XML, messaging, and event-driven patterns.
- Develop middleware services that transform, route, validate, and orchestrate requests across multiple systems.
- Work with technologies such as Kafka, Pub/Sub, JMS, API gateways, and service-to-service integrations.
- Handle high-volume synchronous and asynchronous transaction flows.
- Design appropriate error handling, retry, dead-letter, timeout, and recovery mechanisms.
- Troubleshoot complex issues across multiple applications and integration layers.
GCP & Cloud-Native Engineering
- Design and deploy services on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
- Hands-on experience with relevant GCP services such as:
- Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
- Cloud Run
- Pub/Sub
- Cloud Storage
- Cloud SQL
- Secret Manager
- IAM
- Cloud Logging and Monitoring
- Build containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes.
- Implement secure workload identity, secrets management, and IAM-based access control.
- Design applications considering high availability, scalability, disaster recovery, and observability.
DevOps, CI/CD & Observability
- Work with CI/CD pipelines using technologies such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or equivalent.
- Implement automated build, test, security scanning, and deployment pipelines.
- Work with Infrastructure-as-Code solutions such as Terraform.
- Establish monitoring and observability using technologies such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or GCP Cloud Monitoring.
- Diagnose production problems using logs, metrics, traces, thread dumps, heap analysis, and application performance data.
Engineering Quality & Security
- Ensure applications meet enterprise security and coding standards.
- Apply secure coding practices for APIs and microservices.
- Implement authentication and authorization using technologies such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWT, and mTLS.
- Identify performance bottlenecks and drive application optimization.
- Ensure adequate automated test coverage and quality gates.
- Participate in production incident analysis and root-cause analysis.
Experience
- 6+ years of software engineering experience, with substantial hands-on Java development.
- 4+ years working with Spring Boot and microservices architectures.
- Strong experience designing and developing enterprise middleware/integration solutions.
- Practical experience delivering applications on GCP or a comparable public-cloud platform, with hands-on GCP experience strongly preferred.
- Experience with distributed, high-volume, highly available systems.
- Prior experience functioning as a Technical Lead or Lead Engineer, including design/code reviews and mentoring.
- Experience taking services from design through development, testing, deployment, and production support.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience modernizing monolithic or legacy middleware applications into cloud-native microservices.
- Experience with API gateways and service mesh technologies such as Istio.
- Knowledge of asynchronous/event-driven architectures using Kafka or GCP Pub/Sub.
- Experience with performance engineering and JVM troubleshooting.
- Familiarity with 12-factor application principles and cloud-native application design.
- Experience working in Agile/Scrum engineering environments.
- GCP certification such as Professional Cloud Developer or Professional Cloud Architect is an advantage.
Leadership Expectations
The Lead Software Engineer should remain strongly hands-on, rather than functioning only as a people or project lead. A reasonable expectation for the role is roughly 80% technical design/coding/review and 20% technical leadership, mentoring, cross-team coordination, and delivery ownership, depending on project phase.
The successful candidate should be able to:
- Own a complex service or integration end-to-end.
- Break large requirements into implementable technical components.
- Guide engineers through complex design and production issues.
- Challenge designs constructively and propose practical alternatives.
- Communicate architectural decisions clearly to both engineering and non-engineering stakeholders.
- Drive technical issues to closure across multiple teams.
We will give careful consideration to your application and review your details against the position criteria. You will receive separate notification as your application progresses.
Please note that only candidates who meet the minimum criteria for the role will proceed in the selection process.
#LI-Hybrid#LI-BG1Skills Required
- 6+ years of software engineering experience with substantial hands-on Java development
- 4+ years working with Spring Boot and microservices architectures
- Strong experience designing and developing enterprise middleware and integration solutions
- Practical experience delivering applications on GCP or a comparable public-cloud platform
- Experience with distributed, high-volume, highly available systems
- Prior experience as a Technical Lead or Lead Engineer, including design/code reviews and mentoring
- Experience taking services through design, development, testing, deployment, and production support
- Airline domain experience
- Experience modernizing monolithic or legacy middleware applications into cloud-native microservices
- Experience with API gateways and service mesh technologies such as Istio
- Knowledge of asynchronous/event-driven architectures using Kafka or GCP Pub/Sub
- Experience with performance engineering and JVM troubleshooting
- Familiarity with 12-factor application principles and cloud-native application design
- Experience working in Agile/Scrum engineering environments
- GCP certification such as Professional Cloud Developer or Professional Cloud Architect
Sabre Corporation Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Sabre Corporation and has not been reviewed or approved by Sabre Corporation.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time off is expansive, with five weeks of PTO from day one, eight paid holidays, floating holidays, and a companywide year‑end break. Paid volunteer time further broadens available leave.
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Parental & Family Support — Parental leave provides 12 weeks fully paid for birth or adoption, complemented by generous bereavement leave up to 15 paid days. Disability coverage and dependent eligibility to age 26 reinforce family support.
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Retirement Support — A 401(k) with a strong company match underpins long‑term savings. This foundation strengthens overall financial security alongside core benefits.
Sabre Corporation Insights
What We Do
We are a software and technology company that powers the global travel industry. With decades of revolutionary firsts, our team of experts drive innovation and ingenuity in the industry. Today, we are creating a new marketplace for personalized travel. We partner with airlines, hoteliers, agencies and other travel partners to retail, distribute and fulfill travel. We are committed to helping customers operate more efficiently, drive revenue and offer personalized traveler experiences with next-generation technology solutions. Positioned at the center of the business of travel, our platform connects people with experiences that matter in their lives. Sabre's technology powers the nearly US$8 trillion travel industry. Our technology and data-driven solutions help our airline, hotel, travel agency and corporate customers grow their businesses and transform the traveler experience. The scale, breadth and depth of our technology is unmatched and sustains a complex industry. We provide an open and stable platform to deliver flexible, reliable and scalable solutions. Over the years, we have shaped and modernized the travel industry. We pioneered online travel agencies, corporate booking tools, revenue management, and web and mobile itinerary tools, to name a few. Our travel marketplace transacts more than US$120 billion of travel spend per year. And we are the world’s largest provider of airline and hotel technology. We have been named to the InformationWeek 500 list of the most innovative technology companies for 11 consecutive years. And InformationWeek named Sabre seventh on its list of the “Greatest Software Ever Written.”
