About the role
KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG), is the world’s leading travel search engine. With billions of queries across our platforms, we help people find their perfect flight, stay, rental car and vacation package. We’re also transforming business travel with a new corporate travel solution, KAYAK for Business.
As an employee of KAYAK, you will be part of a travel company that operates a portfolio of global metasearch brands including momondo, Cheapflights and HotelsCombined, among others. From start-up to industry leader, innovation is in our DNA and every employee has an opportunity to make their mark. Our focus is on building the best travel search engine to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.
KAYAK is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the development and evolution of its shared data platform in a hands-on technical leadership role. This is a senior, hands-on leadership role. You will lead a Berlin-based team, set technical direction, make key architecture decisions, and get directly involved in the hardest platform and reliability problems. The team owns shared data infrastructure and raw data quality foundations, including ingestion, storage, orchestration, runtime, and platform governance. You will work closely with Engineering, Data Science, Data Engineering, Operations, Security, and Product partners to build a scalable, trusted, and cost-effective platform for analytics, reporting, experimentation, and machine learning.
This role is required to work from our Berlin office 3 days per week.
In this role, you will:
Own the roadmap for KAYAK’s shared data platform.
Lead and develop a high-performing Berlin-based team of data platform engineers.
Evolve the platform architecture across ingestion, storage, orchestration, runtime, and lakehouse foundations.
Build core capabilities such as schema registry, data contracts, observability, metadata, and semantic layer implementation.
Enforce data retention policies and platform controls for different data types and usage needs.
Improve platform reliability by building the tooling and platform capabilities needed for monitoring, alerting, incident response, and operational readiness.
Drive platform modernization and simplify legacy systems where it creates clear value.
Define clear ownership boundaries so the platform team owns shared infrastructure and raw data quality, while downstream teams own business logic.
Please apply if:
You have 8+ years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, data architecture, or a related role.
You have meaningful people-management experience and a high technical bar.
You have strong knowledge of large-scale data platform architecture, including streaming, batch, storage, orchestration, and distributed query engines.
You have hands-on experience with technologies relevant to KAYAK’s stack, such as Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, Trino, AWS, Kubernetes, Airflow, Python, SQL, and schema-based data contracts.
You have led platforms with high-throughput event streams and large-scale analytical data.
You have led platform migrations or infrastructure modernization efforts with strong judgment on risk, reliability, cost, and business continuity.
You are comfortable working across Engineering, Data Science, Data Engineering, Operations, Security, and Product on technically complex topics.
You bring high ownership, sound judgment, systems thinking, and the ability to influence senior stakeholders.
Benefits and Perks:
Work from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year
Focus on mental health and well-being:
Company-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth
Company-paid subscription to HeadSpace
Company-wide week off a year - the whole team fully recharges (and returns without a pile-up of work!)
No meeting Fridays
Paid parental leave
Paid volunteer time
Focus on your career growth:
Development Dollars
Leadership development
Access to thousands of on-demand e-learnings
Travel Discounts
Employee Resource Groups
6 weeks paid vacation + a day off for your birthday
Free lunch 2 days per week
Pension plan contributions
Public transportation subsidies
Bike leasing program
Monthly social events, Thursday happy hours, sports teams
An awesome office in Friedrichshain, Berlin
Inclusion
At KAYAK, we want everyone to have the space to grow, share ideas and do great work. That’s why we’re focused on hiring the best talent from all walks of life and experiences, supporting them well and making sure no one feels like they have to fit a mold to belong here.
Need any adjustments for the interview, application or on the job? No problem - just give us a heads-up. We’ve got you.
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