Booking Holdings Romania- Regulatory Compliance Team Lead

Booking Holdings Romania is a Center of Excellence based in Bucharest, Romania and was created to support the increasing business demands of the Booking Holdings Brands. The Center of Excellence provides access to specialized and highly skilled talent, leading industry best practices, and collaboration opportunities across all of our Brands.

As part of our Booking Holdings Romania team, you will have the opportunity to be a part of the world’s leading provider of online travel, with a mission of making it easier for everyone to experience the world through five-primary consumer facing brands: Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, KAYAK and OpenTable.

This role provides a hybrid way of working with an onsite presence of 2 days/week.

The CoE Legal and Public Affairs Services team is looking for a team lead with substantial experience in risk management and compliance, to partner with the Regulatory Compliance team within the Legal and Public Affairs department of Booking.com for the development of the Booking.com Regulatory Compliance Program focused on: regulatory risk management; audit support, and regulatory control development and monitoring. The role will partner closely with members of the Regulatory Compliance Team in Amsterdam and other cross-functional stakeholders across Booking.

This is a high impact role for a candidate who is passionate about compliance and operational excellence, and thrives in a constantly evolving environment. A successful candidate will display strong analytical and critical thinking skills and a customer-centric approach, is self-motivated and possesses strong business risk management skills in the area of regulatory compliance, as well as the ability to work efficiently and drive decision-making horizontally across a variety of functions. The role balances operational and coordination activities in the area of regulatory compliance, as well as people management responsibilities.

People manager responsibilities. Lead a team of legal and compliance specialists including:

• Act as initial point of escalation for team members,

• Lead individual and team performance, task delegation and timely delivery, continue to develop, monitor and report performance metrics for the CoE Compliance and Ethics team.

• Conduct individual performance reviews and provide continuing feedback, identifying areas for improvement in productivity and quality and offering related guidance and support for continuing improvement

• Provide guidance and support to direct reports for their personal development and growth in line with business goals, identify key learning opportunities including formal training sessions and workshops.

Regulatory audit responsibilities.

• Support annual regulatory audits, including mandatory audits under the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act

• Manage intake requests from external auditors either individually or with support from the CoE Compliance and Ethics team, depending on scope and complexity

• Work with internal stakeholders cross-functionally to respond to those requests in view of demonstrating compliance with regulatory obligations that impact the global business of Booking.com

Risk management responsibilities.

• Implement control-monitoring protocols including reporting and escalation, either individually or with support from the CoE Compliance and Ethics team, depending on scope and complexity

• Regular engagement with senior level cross-functional stakeholders both within the global Legal and Public Affairs department of Booking.com and across various business teams of Booking.com

• Where applicable, coordinate with stakeholders across various brands of Booking Holdings to define and implement an effective cross-brand approach to compliance with relevant regulations

Regular engagement with internal and external stakeholders.

• Work efficiently with the business teams and risks and controls teams to effectively design controls and prevent/ mitigate regulatory risk

• Provide specialized guidance to the business on the most effective controls to implement and support them with controls design driven by regulatory requirements

• Work closely with internal and external stakeholders to achieve risk-based decisions on control implementation

• Respond to questions, resolve challenges and offer generalized support to relevant internal and external stakeholders to ensure and demonstrate compliance with applicable regulatory obligations

• Operationalize supervising and testing protocols to document the effectiveness of controls, identify areas of improvement and drive improvement initiatives

• Report to the senior leadership of Booking.com regarding regulatory compliance initiatives, including risk assessments and risk mitigation, controls design.

• Strategic contribution to the overall governance structure of the global Regulatory Compliance Program of Booking.com, with potential impact on the other Booking Holdings brands

• Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Economics, Business Administration, Legal or related field

• 5+ years of experience in regulatory risk management, business risk management, internal and/or external audit, internal controls design and management

• Excellent communication skills

• Excellent presentations skills including the ability to develop presentations for senior leadership

• Ability to function well in a highly-matrixed structure

• Data analysis and data visualization skills

• Strong analytical and critical thinking skills, and a data-driven approach

• Strong organizational skills and a high degree of attention to detail

• Resilient and customer-centric

• Fluent in written and verbal English

• Strong work ethic, enthusiastic and adaptable

• Ability to work independently and a standout colleague

• Execution-focused mentality with the ability to handle challenging priorities and adapt in a multifaceted and innovative environment

• Experience with managing a team either on a project basis or as a team lead

• Experience working in a multinational environment

• Professional certification in compliance

• Experience working with Legal teams or a background in Legal

• Contributing to a high scale, complex, world renowned product and seeing real-time impact of your work on millions of travelers worldwide

• Working in a fast-paced and performance driven culture

• Technical, behavioral and interpersonal competence advancement via on-the-job opportunities, experimental projects, hackathons, conferences and active community participation

• Competitive compensation and benefits package

• Vast amounts of data to validate your ideas and the opportunity to experiment with real users

Booking Holdings is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. We strive to move well beyond traditional equal opportunity and work to create an environment that allows everyone to thrive.

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.