Data Platform Manager, KAYAK
3 days a week in office (Friedrichshain, Berlin)
Travel search engine
Be an early applicant
Travel search engine
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
3 days a week in office (Friedrichshain, Berlin)
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help millions of travelers around the globe make confident travel decisions.
Role
Who you are
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
Our take
KAYAK is a travel agency and metasearch engine owned and operated by Booking Holdings. KAYAK processes over 6 billion queries across its platforms each year for travel information - as one of the world’s leading travel search engines, KAYAK searches other sites to show travellers the information they need to find the right flights, hotels, rental cars and vacation packages. It offers a variety of tools and features such as KAYAK trips, explore, and price forecast.
There’s been speculation over the years about online travel companies getting into the hotel business, and KAYAK is no exception. The company is expanding its hospitality offerings beyond its traditional hotel referral and booking services, but despite speculation through the 2020s, has stopped short of opening hotels under its own brand, preferring to partner with preexisting companies on their hotel tech.
Since being acquired by Booking Holdings, the global leader in online travel, in 2013, KAYAK has continued to expand and innovate, enhancing the travel experience for users all around the world. And now KAYAK manages a portfolio of metasearch brands including SWOODOO, checkfelix, momondo, Cheapflights, Mundi and HotelsCombined. With the aim to make it easier for everyone to experience the world - it now operates sites in more than 70 countries and territories.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
6% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company benefits
- Work flexibly: Our global flexible work policy lets our teams decide if they head into one of our offices or work from anywhere else
- Team-wide time off: Most of our team disconnects at the same time each year to recharge and reconnect
- Global volunteer week: Take VTO (Volunteer Time Off) to support the organizations and charitable efforts you believe in
- Wellness: We take care of each other - providing opportunities and spaces to live that work-life balance
- Resource groups: Our five ERGs are employee-led groups for underrepresented communities and their allies
- Career growth: We provide opportunities for our team to develop their skills – or learn new ones – on their own terms
Company HQ
East Side of Stamford, Stamford, CT
Leadership
Steve Hafner
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously Board Member of Trulia, Blade and SeatGeek and currently an Executive at OpenTable.
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