Base Salary
$110k - $120k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design and deliver scalable backend services for the Trips product, retention features, and high-volume email and push notification pipelines.
- Develop and improve bulk and transactional messaging services for millions of sends with strong reliability and performance.
- Build retention features such as Trips functionality, price alerts, and personalized engagement touchpoints.
- Architect and maintain integrations with third-party APIs and marketing platforms.
- Lead complex features from technical scoping and architecture through deployment, monitoring, and production support.
- Collaborate with product managers, marketing specialists, designers, and globally distributed engineers to translate business requirements into solutions.
- Debug and optimize full-stack solutions, performance issues, data pipeline failures, and production incidents.
- Uphold coding standards, participate in pull request reviews, and maintain operational monitoring, alerting, and incident response.
- Coach and mentor junior and mid-level engineers through reviews, design discussions, and knowledge sharing.
- Evaluate AI-assisted tooling and automation to improve developer productivity, personalization, and platform capabilities.
Requirements
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience delivering production-grade backend systems.
- Strong Java programming skills and the ability to independently design, implement, and own complex backend features.
- Experience designing and consuming APIs and working with SQL and relational databases such as MySQL.
- Experience leading complex technical solutions, making architectural tradeoffs, and owning features through deployment and ongoing operations.
- Experience collaborating with product managers, marketing partners, designers, and globally distributed engineering teams.
- Ability to mentor engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and knowledge sharing.
- Ability to manage multiple priorities and adapt to changing needs without close direction.
- Education in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience and transferable skills.
- JavaScript, React, HTML, and CSS experience is a plus.
Benefits
- Hybrid work from the Cambridge or Concord, Massachusetts office 3 days per week, with the option to work from almost anywhere for up to 20 days per year.
- Company-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth and a company-paid Headspace subscription.
- Company-wide week off, paid parental leave, generous paid vacation, birthday time off, paid volunteer time, and comprehensive sick, medical, bereavement, floating holiday, and holiday leave.
- Development dollars, leadership development, thousands of on-demand e-learning courses, and employee resource groups.
- Travel discounts, competitive retirement and health plans, life insurance, flexible spending account, and free lunch 2 days per week.
- Quarterly events such as boat trips, arcades, ski trips, and happy hours.
Tech Stack
Categories
About KAYAK
At KAYAK, we help millions of travelers around the globe make confident travel decisions. We are a leading travel search engine. KAYAK searches other sites to show travelers the information they need to find the right flights, hotels, rental cars and vacation packages. And because we aim to help travelers explore the world more confidently, we’re always on the lookout for ways to make travel planning and trip management easier – offering up a variety of tools and features such as KAYAK Trips, Explore, Price Forecast and our constantly evolving app and A.I. innovations. KAYAK is part of a global network that includes our sister brand OpenTable, as well as a portfolio of travel metasearch brands including Swoodoo, checkfelix, momondo, Cheapflights, Mundi and HotelsCombined. Collectively, we’re uniquely equipped to help people experience the world through travel and dining. KAYAK is part of Booking Holdings Inc. and operates sites in more than 70 countries and territories. KAYAK will never request payment(s) from its candidates for open positions. If you have ever been contacted about a job at KAYAK by phone/Whatsapp or email, and have been asked to provide a Credit Card, wire transfer or crypto payment, please be aware that KAYAK is not associated with this outreach. If you receive a suspicious request regarding a career opportunity at KAYAK, please report it to us. To find out more, visit KAYAK.com.