{"id":2355325,"url":"https://alion.io/job/kayak-machine-learning-engineer-manager","title":"Machine Learning Engineer Manager","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":41,"computed_at":"2026-10-12T06:55:09Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","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":72000,"max_usd":152000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":13},"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"GitHub Actions","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Trino","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-12T12:35:52Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-12","last_verified_at":"2026-10-12T19:24:37Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG), is the world's 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 at our core 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.\nKAYAK is seeking aMachine Learning Engineering Manager to lead the development and evolution of its shared Machine Learning Platform. This is a senior, hands-on technical leadership role.\nYou’ll lead a Berlin-based team which builds the shared infrastructure and developer workflows that take models from experimentation to reliable production. You’ll own its technical direction, roadmap, and delivery while staying hands-on with architecture and the hardest engineering problems. In partnership with the team, you’ll build self-service capabilities for training, deployment, serving, and monitoring so KAYAK teams can ship models safely and at scale.\nIf you’re excited to combine people leadership with building the systems that make machine learning work in production, we’d love to hear from you.\nThis role will be required to work from our Berlin office 3 days per week.\nIn this role, you will:\nOwn the strategy and roadmap for KAYAK’s shared Machine Learning Platform, aligning technical investments with business needs and long-term platform evolution.\n\nLead, mentor, and grow a high-performing Berlin-based team of Machine Learning Platform Engineers, fostering technical excellence, autonomy, and operational accountability.\n\nDrive technical direction across platform architecture and the ML lifecycle, contributing hands-on to high-impact problems and simplifying legacy systems where it creates clear value.\n\nBuild and evolve shared ML capabilities, including training orchestration, model serving, feature management, and LLM workflows, improving developer experience and enabling teams to deliver production-ready ML solutions efficiently.\n\nChampion platform reliability and operational excellence, establishing robust monitoring, alerting, incident response, and production-readiness standards.\n\nDefine clear ownership boundaries so the platform team owns shared infrastructure and lifecycle tooling, while downstream teams own use-case-specific model and business logic.\n\nCollaborate with Data Science, Engineering, and Operations teams to plan and deliver complex, multi-team initiatives, ensuring clear alignment on scope, dependencies, and timelines.\n\nPlease apply if you have:\nStrong technical foundations in software engineering, machine learning, and systems design, backed by significant hands-on experience building and operating production ML systems, platforms, or infrastructure.\n\nAt least 5 years of experience with ML lifecycle systems, including training orchestration, model serving, feature management, and monitoring, with a solid understanding of scalability, reliability, and operational trade-offs.\n\nMeaningful people leadership experience, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and developing experienced technical talent, while maintaining a high technical bar and contributing hands-on where it matters most.\n\nStrong ownership, judgment, and systems thinking, with the ability to balance platform evolution, developer experience, reliability, cost, and technical debt while influencing senior stakeholders.\n\nAbility to lead across organizational boundaries, aligning teams around shared infrastructure, navigating competing priorities, and driving platform adoption through collaboration rather than authority.\n\nFluency with AI-assisted workflows, leveraging modern tools to improve productivity and quality while critically evaluating their outputs and limitations.\n\nCuriosity, humility, and a collaborative mindset, with a commitment to continuous improvement and the ability to inspire the same in others.\n\nBonus qualifications\nHands-on experience with technologies relevant to KAYAK’s stack, such as Python, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, Kafka, AWS, Airflow, and Trino.\n\nExperience building LLM or agent workflows, including prompt or dataset-processing pipelines\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":5754,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Germany","iso":"DE","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Price Comparison","Travel Technology"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-12T14:40:31Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":41,"reasons":["conf:2","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-12T21:48:48Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/kayak-machine-learning-engineer-manager","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/kayak-machine-learning-engineer-manager.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-12T21:48:48Z","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":35604,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-13T00:00:00Z"}},"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-machine-learning-engineer-manager"},{"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-machine-learning-engineer-manager"},{"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-machine-learning-engineer-manager"},{"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-machine-learning-engineer-manager\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fkayak-machine-learning-engineer-manager"}]}