{"id":85921,"url":"https://alion.io/job/kayak-engineering-manager-k4b-2","title":"Engineering Manager, K4B","company":{"id":3573,"name":"KAYAK","domain":"kayak.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/kayak","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"C","score":69,"open_postings":4,"ghost_share":0.25,"stale_share":0.5,"repost_share":0.25,"time_to_fill_p50_days":38,"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Berlin, Germany"],"countries":["DE"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":79000,"max_usd":159000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":12},"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agile","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"GitHub","optional":false},{"name":"Jira","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-17T11:12:18Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-07-17","last_verified_at":"2026-10-18T08:46:20Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":92,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":92},"description":"KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG), is a leading travel search engine. With billions of queries across our platforms, we help people find their perfect flight, stay, rental car and vacation package. We're also transforming business travel with a new corporate travel solution, KAYAK for Business.\nAs an employee of KAYAK, you will be part of a travel company that operates a portfolio of global metasearch brands including momondo, Cheapflights and HotelsCombined, among others. From start-up to industry leader, innovation is in our DNA and every employee has an opportunity to make their mark. Our focus is on building the best travel search engine to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.\nAt KAYAK for Business, we're building the future of corporate travel technology - and the engineering teams behind it are at the heart of that mission. As an Engineering Manager, you'll lead one or more agile engineering teams delivering software that helps companies and their travelers move smarter and with less friction, while playing a key role in shaping our growing engineering hub.\nThis role will be required to work from our Berlin office at least 3 days per week.\nIn this role you will:\nOwn 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.\n\nDefine 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.\n\nDesign 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.\n\nLead 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.\n\nCoach 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.\n\nCollaborate 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.\n\nIdentify 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.\n\nChampion 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.\n\nInfluence 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.\n\nHelp 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.\n\nPlease apply if you have:\n1+ 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.\n\n8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 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.\n\nA 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.\n\nA track record of steering organizational transformation, maximizing gains from agile methodologies, and fostering process optimization and innovation\n\nStrong 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.\n\nDemonstrated experience owning the full people management lifecycle - hiring, onboarding, performance management, career development, and promotions - with a genuine commitment to developing engineering talent.\n\nExperience coaching and developing engineers at multiple levels, including senior engineers and emerging technical leads, through structured feedback, regular 1:1s, and deliberate career conversations.\n\nSolid 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.\n\nExcellent 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.\n\nProfessional proficiency in written and spoken English.\n\nHands-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.\n\nComfort working in a distributed, multilingual engineering organization with teams across multiple time zones and office locations.\n\nA degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience; no specific certification is required.\n\nBenefits and Perks:\nWork from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year\n\nFocus on mental health and well-being:\nCompany-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth\n\nCompany-paid subscription to HeadSpace\n\nCompany-wide week off a year - the whole team fully recharges (and returns without a pile-up of work!)\n\nNo meeting Fridays\n\nPaid parental leave\n\nPaid volunteer time\n\nFocus on your career growth:\nDevelopment Dollars\n\nLeadership development\n\nAccess to thousands of on-demand e-learnings\n\nTravel Discounts\n\nEmployee Resource Groups\n\n6 weeks paid vacation + a day off for your birthday\n\nFree lunch 2 days per week\n\nPension plan contributions\n\nPublic transportation subsidies\n\nBike leasing program\n\nMonthly social events, Thursday happy hours, sports teams\n\nAn awesome office in Friedrichshain, Berlin\n\nInclusion\nAt 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.\nNeed any adjustments for the interview, application or on the job? No problem - just give us a heads-up. We’ve got you.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7170,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"English","level":"All levels","optional":false}]},"benefits":["Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Price Comparison","Travel Technology"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-07-17T11:12:18Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":14,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.49,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":91,"expected_fill_days":38,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/kayak-engineering-manager-k4b-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/kayak-engineering-manager-k4b-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-18T09:13:55Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":13729,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-19T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":3573},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=3573"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fkayak-engineering-manager-k4b-2"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fkayak-engineering-manager-k4b-2"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fkayak-engineering-manager-k4b-2"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/kayak-engineering-manager-k4b-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fkayak-engineering-manager-k4b-2"}]}