Senior ML Ops Engineer, KAYAK
More information about location
3 days a week in office
Travel search engine
Posted today
Travel search engine
1001+ employees
Posted today
More information about location
3 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help millions of travelers around the globe make confident travel decisions.
Role
Who you are
- Experience building and operating ML platforms in production environments
- Solid working knowledge of containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), Linux internals, and model serving at scale
- Familiarity with ML lifecycle tooling, including orchestration frameworks, feature stores, model registries, and drift or performance monitoring
- Experience owning production systems: defining service-level objectives (SLOs), building observability (for example, using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog), participating in incident response, and diagnosing large-scale failures systematically. You look for opportunities to automate repetitive work rather than absorb it
- Comfort writing production-quality code in Python or a comparable language
- Experience modernizing production infrastructure with attention to reliability, risk, and cost — including thoughtful sequencing of work to maintain availability and continuity for live systems
- The ability to take ownership of technical outcomes, advocate for decisions using data, and communicate clearly in writing and in person — to both technical and non-technical audiences
What the job involves
- KAYAK is seeking a Senior MLOps Engineer who will focus on the design and implementation of our machine learning infrastructure and production lifecycle
- This is a senior, hands-on role where you will bridge the gap between data science and production engineering
- You will join the Machine Learning Platform team and be responsible for building and maintaining scalable infrastructure & automated pipelines for model training, deployment, and monitoring, ensuring our ML models are reliable, reproducible, and performant
- You will work closely with Data Scientists, ML Engineering and Operations teams to transform experimental code into robust, production-ready services at scale
- Build and maintain ML infrastructure end-to-end: Extend and operate the infrastructure that powers every model we ship — including CI/CD pipelines, model orchestration, and automated training pipelines designed to scale reliably without manual intervention
- Own model deployment and serving: Help define and evolve the standards and tooling for model serving, ensuring low latency and high availability across our ML services
- Develop core MLOps capabilities: Establish and maintain essential infrastructure that functions as reliable, self-service systems for the entire machine learning organization — with a focus on feature stores, model registries, and automated monitoring for performance and data drift
- Operationalize infrastructure for the ML team: Collaborate with Operations to enable Kubernetes (k8s) autoscaling and GPU provisioning, turning these into accessible, self-service tools for ML practitioners — including standing up and operating a Kubernetes-based development cluster and taking models from experimentation to GPU-backed production
- Improve platform reliability and performance: Partner with Operations to design resilient monitoring using advanced observability tooling. Define service-level objectives and implement automation to reduce manual interventions and improve system reliability
- Empower Data Scientists through standardized, optimized workflows: Amplify the impact of the ML team by building clear, well-supported "golden paths" — standardized workflows that streamline the model development lifecycle and let Data Scientists focus on modeling while you handle the infrastructure
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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