Manager of Kubernetes Operations, KAYAK
$175-200k
+ Equity
Office located in Concord, MA
Travel search engine
Open for applications
Travel search engine
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$175-200k
+ Equity
Office located in Concord, MA
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help millions of travelers around the globe make confident travel decisions.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, or platform/infrastructure engineering, with at least 3 years in an engineering leadership or management role
- A proven track record of operating large-scale, 24/7 production Kubernetes environments, including cluster lifecycle management (upgrades, node provisioning, capacity planning) and workload migration from legacy container orchestration platforms
- Deep, hands-on expertise with Kubernetes — including RBAC design, network policy, cluster hardening, and multi-environment operations spanning on-premises and cloud infrastructure
- A strong technical foundation in both on premise and cloud infrastructure (GCP and/or AWS) and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform and Ansible
- Experience as a people manager with a demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain engineering talent, and a commitment to building inclusive, high-performing teams
- Solid experience with modern observability tooling — such as Prometheus, Grafana, or equivalent — including alerting, dashboarding, and incident-driven tuning
- Proficiency in at least one scripting or automation language (Python, Go, or Bash) to support infrastructure-as-code workflows and reduce operational toil
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to articulate a clear technical vision and work effectively with cross-functional engineering, security, and product teams
- A degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
What the job involves
- Our focus is on building the best travel search engine to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.
- KAYAK is seeking a Manager, Kubernetes Operations to lead the team responsible for the reliability, scalability, and security of our container orchestration platform
- In this role, you will combine deep technical expertise with a genuine passion for people leadership — guiding a team of platform engineers while shaping the strategy that keeps our containerized production environment running at global scale
- You will be a key partner to engineering, security, and infrastructure teams, helping KAYAK move faster and more safely by building a platform your colleagues can depend on
- Own the technical roadmap and operational strategy for the Kubernetes platform, ensuring cluster reliability, scalability, and security across production and non-production environments
- Lead a team of container platform engineers, taking full responsibility for hiring, performance management, and career development to build a high-performing, inclusive team
- Deliver a continuously improving container platform by driving cluster lifecycle management — including version upgrades, node provisioning, capacity planning, and workload migration from legacy orchestration platforms
- Coach engineers on Kubernetes best practices, container security, RBAC design, and operational excellence, fostering a culture of ownership and continuous learning
- Collaborate closely with software engineering, security, and infrastructure teams to ensure containerized workloads are reliable, observable, and deployable with confidence
- Drive the adoption of infrastructure-as-code and GitOps practices for cluster configuration and application deployment, reducing manual toil and improving consistency across environments
- Design and enforce standards for Kubernetes observability — including metrics collection, alerting, and dashboarding — so the team can detect and resolve incidents quickly and conduct effective post-incident reviews
- Hold the team to a high standard of operational excellence, including on-call practices, incident response, and blameless post-mortems
- Collaborate with adjacent operations and engineering leaders to align the Kubernetes platform roadmap with broader infrastructure and product engineering goals
- Advance the team's security posture by partnering with security teams on cluster hardening, network policy enforcement, and compliance requirements
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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