Director of Product, Search

About Booking.com Established in 1996 in Amsterdam, Booking.com has grown from a small Dutch start-up to one of the largest ecommerce companies in the world. Booking.com is the largest business within Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG) and accounts for the vast majority of Booking Holdings’ total revenue. Booking Holdings is a leading Fortune 500 e-commerce conglomerate with a market cap of roughly $140 billion. Booking.com currently employs approximately 13,000 employees in 140 offices in 70 countries worldwide.

With a mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world, Booking.com invests in digital technology that helps take the friction out of travel. Booking.com connects travelers with the world’s largest selection of incredible places to stay, including everything from apartments, vacation homes, and family-run B&Bs to 5-star luxury resorts and even tree houses. The Booking.com website and mobile apps are available in over 44 languages, offer more than 28M total reported listings, and cover over 174,000 destinations in 229 countries worldwide. Offering 30 different types of places to stay, including homes, apartments, B&Bs, hostels, farm stays, bungalows, even boats, igloos, and treehouses. So whether travelling for business or leisure, customers can instantly book their ideal accommodation quickly and easily, without booking fees and backed up by its promise to match. Via the customer experience team, customers can reach Booking.com 24/7 for assistance and support in over 44 languages, any time of the day or night.

At Booking.com, we are all involved in making hundreds of decisions every day. The decisions we make are a reflection of our Values - they reflect what is important to us, both as individuals and as an organisation.

When Values are made explicit, they provide clarity on what “good” looks like. And when they are shared, they build unity in a group. They build culture.

• Think customer first. We obsess about adding value for our customers - guests, partners, colleagues - to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.
• Own it. We deliver on our promises, make informed decisions and prioritize to get the important things done today.
• Learn forever. We are resilient, take time to reflect, and seek to learn – from colleagues, from the outside world and from our failures.
• Succeed together. We celebrate team success, through making connections, building trust and valuing the diverse perspectives of others.
• Do the right thing. We get the right results the right way. For each other, our communities and the world around us.

Job Summary As Director of Product – Search, you will lead the Search product organisation within Marketplace Product Experience and own the multi‑year direction for how Booking.com uses intent‑aware, natural‑language and AI‑powered search to help travellers find and shape trips, not just single properties.

This role operates at Product Director scope: responsible for multiple product groups, driving multi‑year planning, strategy and resource allocation, and leading complex cross‑BU initiatives that connect Search with Conversational, Trip Planning and the broader Connected Trip system.

The Director is accountable not only for customer and business impact, but also for Product Quality and Excellence: ensuring Search experiences and capabilities are reliable, maintainable, operationally healthy, compliant with Non‑Functional Requirements, and strategically aligned with Booking.com’s long‑term product and technology direction.

This role is a critical lever in delivering Marketplace Product Experience objectives for 2026 and beyond, in particular:

• Connected Trip: evolve Search from a strong last‑mile booking engine into a world‑class, intent‑aware trip discovery and decisioning capability that serves travellers across inspiration, discovery and booking‑ready modes.
• Accelerate AI: apply Applied AI Product Proficiency to improve both how the Search organisation works and how Search creates customer value, while ensuring responsible, safe and scalable AI adoption.
• Product Quality / Excellence: set and raise the bar on customer value, business value and building products the right way, including reliability, maintainability, operational readiness and adherence to NFRs.
• Cross‑journey coherence: ensure Search works as part of a connected system across Search → Dot → Trip Planning → Booking → Helpfulness → Insights, rather than as an isolated funnel.

Key Responsibilities Product vision, strategy and outcomes

• Own the vertical strategy for Search and set a clear 18 month direction for how Search contributes to Booking.com’s customer experience, marketplace performance and Connected Trip ambition.
• Apply Strategic Thinking to frame the right problems, size opportunities, make sharp trade‑offs, and translate company and Marketplace strategy into an aligned Search portfolio direction.
• Define the strategic narrative for Search across customer value, commercial value and technical evolution, including sequencing of major bets across natural‑language search, unified search UX, thematic discovery, trip‑level results and conversational refinement.
• Own department‑level outcomes for Search, with clear accountability for customer value, business value and Product Quality / Excellence across the portfolio.
• Define and own a measurable performance narrative for Search using relevant portfolio KPIs and leading indicators, linking product metrics to financials, investment decisions and strategic trade‑offs.

Organisation leadership and delivery

• Lead the Search product organisation across multiple product groups, driving 18 month planning and resource allocation while balancing short‑term delivery with long‑term capability investments and North Star architecture direction.
• Ensure delivery excellence across the Search product family, with strong planning, prioritisation, dependency management, risk management and rollout discipline.
• Raise the bar on Search product quality by ensuring reliability, maintainability, compliance, cost efficiency, operational health and adherence to Non‑Functional Requirements at scale.
• Ensure Search capabilities are operationally ready, not just shipped, including monitoring, reliability, incident reduction, technical health and deprecation where needed.
• Balance speed, quality and risk explicitly and ensure Search investments remain strategically fit with customer promises, portfolio priorities, business viability and investment discipline.

Cross‑functional and cross‑organisational collaboration

• Partner with Engineering leadership to make multi‑year architectural investment decisions that shape the future of Search and its role in the broader Connected Trip stack.
• Ensure the Search organisation uses high‑quality data, experiments, customer understanding and forecasting to guide portfolio choices, and makes effective use of Applied AI Product Proficiency to improve both PM effectiveness and product value.
• Lead complex cross‑BU initiatives and decisions where Search intersects with Conversational, Trip Planning, accommodations, flights, transport, attractions, Insights and platform teams.
• Establish decision forums, communication rhythms and alignment mechanisms that reduce organisational friction and improve the quality of Search‑related decisions across functions and business units.
• Represent the Search area credibly and persuasively in VP / SVP‑level forums, shaping clear options, trade‑offs and decision requests rather than presenting strategy as a list of features.

People leadership and product craft

• Develop leaders across the Search organisation, including GPMs, PPMs and senior PMs, and build a strong leadership pipeline for the future.
• Design and evolve the Search product organisation structure so that scope, decision ownership and accountability are clear, sustainable and aligned with business needs.
• Hire, coach and performance‑manage senior PMs and GPMs, ensuring strong team health, portfolio health and a high bar for product craft and leadership.
• Contribute beyond core Search scope by leading improvements that create lasting value across Marketplace Product Experience, Connected Trip and the wider PM craft, including PM quality standards, AI product thinking, product quality frameworks, hiring quality and reusable product management practices.
• Lead as a true people manager rather than a super IC, with clear delegation, frequent feedback, and willingness to handle hard conversations directly and well.

Search Domain – Specific Responsibilities

• Ensure Search solves real traveller needs and materially improves how customers discover, compare, refine and shape trips across multiple mental modes and trip archetypes.
• Drive the evolution of Search from a strong last‑mile booking engine into a world‑class, intent‑aware trip discovery and decisioning capability that serves travellers across inspiration, discovery, booking‑ready, and in-trip modes.
• Ensure Search strategy aligns with Booking’s North Star architecture principles and shared context / platform direction, including consistency across devices, surfaces and connected trip journeys.
• Use customer and user insight as a company‑wide decision principle for Search, ensuring the organisation understands traveller behaviours, motivations, unmet needs and trust barriers across the trip journey.
• Partner with Engineering, Data and ML leaders to shape AI‑enabled Search capabilities that are technically feasible, data‑ready, customer‑valuable and aligned to Booking’s AI standards.

Key Skills Knowledge & Skills Required

• Extensive product leadership experience (typically 10+ years), including several years leading multiple PM teams and managers in a complex, global environment.
• Proven experience operating at Product Director scope: owning multiple product groups, 18 month strategy, resource allocation and complex cross‑BU initiatives.
• Strong Strategic Thinking capability, including business acumen, prioritised sequencing, narrative clarity, and long‑term portfolio trade‑offs.
• Demonstrated track record of driving measurable customer value and business value while raising Product Quality / Excellence at portfolio scale.
• Strong Applied AI Product Proficiency, including ability to improve PM effectiveness with AI, evaluate product AI opportunities, and govern safe, responsible AI use.
• Strong Tech Fluency and ability to partner on architecture, reliability, maintainability and long‑term technical health.
• Excellent stakeholder leadership, able to influence senior leaders through structured narratives, options and clear decision framing.
• Strong command of English, written and spoken.

Preferred

• Background in travel, marketplaces, consumer digital products, search, discovery, recommendations or conversational / AI‑enabled product experiences.
• Experience working at the intersection of traveller‑facing experiences, platform capabilities and AI / ML systems.

Pre-Employment Screening If your application is successful, your personal data may be used for a pre-employment screening check by a third party as permitted by applicable law. Depending on the vacancy and applicable law, a pre-employment screening may include employment history, education and other information (such as media information) that may be necessary for determining your qualifications and suitability for the position.