Senior Engineering Manager, K4B

About the Position

We're seeking a Senior Engineering Manager for K4B at KAYAK to lead agile engineering teams and shape our corporate travel technology.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery for one or more agile engineering teams, ensuring the team consistently ships high-quality software aligned with product and business objectives, measured against clear KPIs.
• Define and drive the technical roadmap for your team's domain - collaborating with product managers and peer engineering leaders to translate business goals into a prioritized, executable plan.
• Design and enforce engineering best practices across the team's codebase, including coding standards, testing strategies, observability, and clear Definition of Done criteria, raising the overall quality bar.
• Lead hiring and performance management for a team of software engineers, owning the full employee lifecycle from sourcing and onboarding through career development, performance reviews, and promotions.
• Coach and develop engineers at all levels - including senior engineers and emerging technical leads - through regular 1:1s, structured feedback, and deliberate career conversations that build the next generation of leaders.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, designers, and peer engineering managers to plan and deliver complex, multi-team initiatives, ensuring clear alignment on scope, dependencies, and timelines.
• Identify and remove delivery risks proactively - whether organizational, technical, or process-related - and drive improvements without waiting to be directed, keeping the team operating at high velocity.
• Champion a culture of quality and continuous improvement, embedding practices such as blameless post-mortems, structured incident response, and iterative process refinement into the team's day-to-day rhythm.
• Influence technical architecture across the team's domain by preparing and participating in design reviews, guiding architectural decisions, and ensuring systems are built for scalability, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Help build and shape the engineering presence, contributing to local talent acquisition, onboarding, and team culture as part of the organization's strategic expansion of its engineering hub.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience leading engineering teams within the travel industry focused on supplier integrations (such as flights, hotels, or trains using Direct APIs, GDS, NDC, NDC[X]) or managing teams executing large-scale third-party content integrations.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in an engineering leadership or management role directly managing software engineers, and a proven track record of leading productive teams and shipping high-quality software in a fast-paced environment; equivalent experience, training, or transferable skills considered.
• A proven track record of ownership and innovation within a data-driven, results-oriented environment, along with the ability to rapidly learn and master new business domains.
• A track record of steering organizational transformation, maximizing gains from agile methodologies, and fostering process optimization and innovation.
• Strong technical fundamentals in distributed systems, API design, and backend service architecture, with the ability to credibly guide architectural decisions and participate meaningfully in design reviews.
• Demonstrated experience owning the full people management lifecycle - hiring, onboarding, performance management, career development, and promotions - with a genuine commitment to developing engineering talent.
• Experience coaching and developing engineers at multiple levels, including senior engineers and emerging technical leads, through structured feedback, regular 1:1s, and deliberate career conversations.
• Solid understanding of agile delivery methodologies and the software development lifecycle, including CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and observability practices; comfortable driving process improvements within a sprint-based team.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to articulate a clear technical vision to both technical and non-technical audiences and collaborate effectively across product, design, and engineering functions.
• Professional proficiency in written and spoken English.
• Hands-on experience with modern software development tooling - including version control systems (e.g., GitHub), issue tracking (e.g., Jira), and logging or observability platforms - and a demonstrated openness to adopting AI-assisted development tools to improve team productivity.
• Comfort working in a distributed, multilingual engineering organization with teams across multiple time zones and office locations.
• A degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience; no specific certification is required.

Compensation

Salary consists of three elements:

• Base pay: from 7080 EUR up to 7900 EUR gross monthly.
• In addition:
  • Significant yearly bonuses, approximately 15% of annual salary.
  • Booking Holdings RSU (Restricted Stock Units) package, worth 50,000 USD gross, with the possibility to receive yearly refreshes.

Salary range provided is not final and will be discussed during the process based on your skills and experience.

Benefits and Perks

• Work from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year
• Funds for your career growth
• Access to thousands of on-demand e-learnings
• Generous additional Health Insurance
• Flexible sick time off
• Additional financial support for your sick leave
• Additional day off on your birthday
• Company-wide vacation week once a year (winter holidays)
• Additional financial support during parental leave
• Free lunch twice a week and daily snacks at the office
• Paid volunteering time
• No meeting Fridays
• Office and team events such as summer camp, KAYAK birthday, winter party, and more!
• Company-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth
• Company-paid subscription to HeadSpace
• Internal Communities

About the Company

At KAYAK, we want everyone to have the space to grow, share ideas, and do great work. That’s why we’re focused on hiring the best talent from all walks of life and experiences, supporting them well, and making sure no one feels like they have to fit a mold to belong here.

Need any adjustments for the interview, application, or on the job? No problem - just give us a heads-up. We’ve got you.

Inclusion

At KAYAK, we want everyone to have the space to grow, share ideas, and do great work. That’s why we’re focused on hiring the best talent from all walks of life and experiences, supporting them well, and making sure no one feels like they have to fit a mold to belong here.

Need any adjustments for the interview, application, or on the job? No problem - just give us a heads-up. We’ve got you.