5 days ago
Base Salary
$140k - $160k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design and deliver scalable backend services for the Trips product, retention features, email systems, and push-notification pipelines.
- Develop and maintain bulk and transactional messaging services handling millions of sends.
- Build retention features including Trips functionality, price alerts, and personalized engagement experiences.
- Architect integrations with third-party APIs and marketing platforms while maintaining data integrity and scalability.
- Own complex features from technical scoping and architecture through deployment, monitoring, and production support.
- Collaborate with product managers, marketing specialists, designers, and globally distributed engineers.
- Debug and optimize full-stack solutions, performance bottlenecks, data pipeline failures, and production issues.
- Contribute to coding standards, pull-request reviews, monitoring, alerting, and incident response.
- Coach and mentor junior and mid-level engineers through reviews, design discussions, and knowledge sharing.
- Explore 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, including RESTful 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 distributed engineering teams.
- Ability to mentor others, manage multiple priorities, adapt to changing needs, and work without close direction.
- Education in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience and transferable skills.
- HTML and CSS experience is preferred, particularly for debugging or collaborating on full-stack solutions.
Benefits
- Base salary range of $140,000-$160,000, excluding annual bonus and recurring RSU grants.
- Work from almost anywhere for up to 20 days per year.
- Work from the Cambridge or Concord, MA office three days per week.
- Company-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth and a company-paid HeadSpace subscription.
- Company-wide week off, paid parental leave, paid vacation, birthday time off, and paid volunteer time.
- Development dollars, leadership development, and access to thousands of on-demand e-learning courses.
- Travel discounts, employee resource groups, competitive retirement and health plans, and free lunch two days per week.
- No-meeting Fridays and quarterly company events.
About KAYAK
KAYAK builds a travel metasearch platform that lets consumers compare flights, hotels, rental cars, and vacation packages across hundreds of sites, plus tools for trip planning. It earns through referrals and advertising and offers KAYAK for Business for corporate travel. Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, KAYAK is part of Booking Holdings and operates a portfolio of brands including momondo, Cheapflights, and HotelsCombined.