Manager, Data Platform

KAYAK part of Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG) is the worlds leading travel search engine. With billions of queries across our platforms we help people find their perfect flight stay rental car and vacation package. Were 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 KAYAKs 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 KAYAKs 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. Thats why were 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. Weve got you.

#LI-MP1

Required Experience:

Manager