1 month ago
Berlin, GermanyStaff+
Responsibilities
- Design and evolve KAYAK’s shared Data Platform across streaming, lakehouse storage, schema management, semantic layers, and distributed query infrastructure.
- Deliver high-impact platform initiatives from problem framing and architecture through implementation, rollout, and operational handoff.
- Define standards for data contracts, schema evolution, ingestion patterns, and production readiness.
- Develop reusable architectures for streaming ingestion, compaction, retention, schema governance, and observability.
- Establish pipeline monitoring, consumer lag tracking, data quality checks, and alerting.
- Drive semantic-layer and metadata strategies for trusted self-service analytics and AI-driven data access.
- Evaluate technologies across streaming, storage, query, orchestration, and cloud infrastructure.
- Own complex platform challenges including failure recovery, schema drift, partition management, and performance degradation.
- Collaborate cross-functionally and mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, and technical guidance.
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional data engineering experience, including meaningful senior- or staff-level experience with domain-wide technical scope.
- Experience designing and operating large-scale lakehouse architectures using open table formats such as Apache Iceberg, Parquet, and cloud object storage.
- Experience building and operating streaming data pipelines with event-driven ingestion, exactly-once semantics, consumer lag management, checkpointing, recovery strategies, and production failure handling.
- Hands-on experience with data contracts, schema governance, metadata, or semantic-layer systems.
- Strong Python skills and experience writing maintainable, testable production code.
- Experience deploying and operating data workloads on Kubernetes, including containerized infrastructure, resource tuning, and health checks.
- Ability to influence multiple teams, communicate architectural trade-offs, drive adoption, and mentor engineers.
- Experience with distributed query engines such as Trino, workflow orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow, AWS or another public cloud provider, CI/CD and deployment automation such as GitHub Actions, and Java or another JVM-based language is preferred.
Benefits
- Work from almost anywhere for up to 20 days per year.
- Berlin office work is required 3 days per week.
- Company-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth and a company-paid Headspace subscription.
- Company-wide week off, no-meeting Fridays, paid parental leave, and paid volunteer time.
- Development Dollars, leadership development, and access to thousands of on-demand e-learning courses.
- Travel discounts, employee resource groups, six weeks of paid vacation, and a birthday day off.
- Free lunch two days per week, pension plan contributions, public transportation subsidies, and a bike leasing program.
- Monthly social events, Thursday happy hours, sports teams, and an office in Friedrichshain, Berlin.
Tech Stack
Categories
Data Engineering
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.