Principal Engineer - Service Delivery

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.
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.
This role is part of a larger transition and is planned as part of a separate team being created in Kraków.
Role Summary
As an Engineer for the IX Platform, you will design, build, and evolve modern cloud-native services supporting high-scale travel and airline technology solutions. You will work on distributed systems, APIs, microservices, data flows, integrations, messaging, and backend components that power mission-critical customer capabilities.
This is a hands-on engineering role focused on strong Java backend development, modern JDK usage, API design, cloud-native delivery, and reliable distributed system design. You will collaborate closely with Product, Architecture, QA, SRE, Delivery, and customer-facing teams to build scalable, secure, maintainable solutions aligned with platform architecture and business needs.
The ideal candidate combines solid software engineering fundamentals with practical experience in enterprise backend systems, cloud platforms, databases, messaging technologies, and modern development practices.
Key Responsibilities
Backend Service Development: Design, develop, test, and maintain backend services using Java and modern JDK capabilities, with focus on clean code, reliability, performance, and maintainability.
API Design & Integration: Build and consume RESTful APIs and integration services for enterprise-grade, high-availability systems. Ensure APIs are well-structured, versioned, documented, secure, and easy to operate.
Cloud-Native Engineering: Develop and deploy services in cloud environments, with strong focus on Google Cloud Platform, containerization, observability, automation, and scalable runtime patterns.
Distributed Systems & Microservices: Work on distributed architectures, microservices, service-to-service communication, fault tolerance, resiliency, scalability, latency, and consistency trade-offs.
Messaging & Event-Driven Architecture: Design and implement asynchronous communication patterns using messaging systems, queues, event streams, and publish/subscribe mechanisms.
Data & Persistence: Work with relational databases, SQL, schema design, query optimization, data access layers, transactions, caching, and data consistency considerations.
Engineering Quality: Write production-quality code with appropriate unit, integration, and component tests. Participate in code reviews and contribute to engineering standards, automation, and continuous improvement.
Technical Collaboration: Partner with architects, engineers, QA, SRE, and product teams to refine requirements, assess technical options, resolve blockers, and deliver robust platform capabilities.
Operational Readiness: Support production-grade software through logging, monitoring, alerting, diagnostics, performance analysis, and incident investigation.
Required Experience & Skills
Java Backend Engineering: Strong hands-on experience with Java backend development and modern JDK versions, including concurrency, collections, streams, memory management, performance considerations, and JVM fundamentals.
API Development: Proven experience designing, developing, consuming, and maintaining REST, SOAP APIs for enterprise systems. Understanding of API contracts, versioning, authentication, authorization, error handling, and documentation standards.
Cloud Experience: Practical experience with cloud-native development, preferably on Google Cloud Platform, including services such as Kubernetes/GKE, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, IAM, monitoring, or related capabilities.
Distributed Systems: Good understanding of distributed system principles, including scalability, resilience, service discovery, retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, idempotency, consistency, latency, and failure handling.
Microservices: Experience building and operating microservice-based systems, including service boundaries, inter-service communication, deployment patterns, configuration management, and observability.
Messaging & Queues: Experience with messaging technologies and event-driven systems such as Kafka, Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, JMS, or similar queueing/streaming platforms.
Databases: Solid experience with relational databases and SQL, plus familiarity with NoSQL stores. Understanding of transactions, indexing, query performance, schema evolution, and data modeling.
Modern Engineering Practices: Experience with automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, Git, code reviews, dependency management, build tools, and secure software development practices.
Containerization & Runtime: Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, containerized workloads, service deployment, configuration, secrets management, and cloud runtime operations.
Problem Solving: Strong analytical skills with the ability to debug complex technical issues across services, APIs, logs, data flows, and environments.
Preferred Experience
Experience with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud or similar Java backend frameworks.
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, or enterprise identity integrations.
Experience with PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, or similar technologies.
Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, Helm, or similar.
Experience in travel, airline, retailing, distribution, booking, fulfillment, or other high-transaction enterprise domains.
Engineering Expectations
Delivers high-quality backend services with minimal supervision.
Understands both implementation detail and broader system architecture.
Makes sound technical decisions based on scalability, reliability, maintainability, and operational impact.
Writes clean, testable, observable, and production-ready code.
Proactively identifies technical risks, dependencies, and design gaps.