{"id":1701638,"url":"https://alion.io/job/kayak-staff-data-platform-engineer","title":"Staff Data Platform Engineer","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":"B","score":83,"open_postings":3,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.667,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":38,"computed_at":"2026-10-02T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Data Science","role_family":"Data Science","seniority":"staff","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":79000,"max_usd":152000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_cell","sample_n":8},"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Airflow","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Iceberg","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"GitHub Actions","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Trino","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-02T08:27:38Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-02","last_verified_at":"2026-10-02T13:37:27Z","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 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 leveraging AI and data to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.\nWe are looking for a Staff Data Engineer to join our Data Platform team. Our team builds and operates the shared foundation that powers analytics, machine learning, business intelligence and AI-driven experiences across the entire company. As a senior individual contributor, you will shape how we move, store, govern, and serve data at scale, enabling every downstream team to build faster and with greater confidence.\nIf you enjoy turning ambiguity into clear technical direction and durable solutions, 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:\nDesign and evolve the architecture of KAYAK’s shared Data Platform, including near-real-time streaming, lakehouse storage, schema management, semantic layer, and distributed query infrastructure. Make thoughtful trade-offs between latency, correctness, cost, and long-term maintainability.\n\nDeliver high-impact platform initiatives end-to-end - from problem framing and architecture design through implementation, rollout, and operational handoff.\n\nDefine and promote technical standards for data contracts, schema evolution, ingestion patterns, and production readiness across platform and domain teams.\n\nLead high-impact platform initiatives from problem framing and architecture design through implementation, rollout, and operational handoff.\n\nDevelop reusable patterns and reference architectures for streaming ingestion, compaction, retention, schema governance, observability, and other recurring data engineering challenges.\n\nEstablish reliable observability across the platform, including pipeline monitoring, consumer lag tracking, data quality checks, and alerting.\n\nCollaborate closely with Operations, Security, Engineering, Data Engineering, and Product to evolve the platform, build cross-functional support, and ensure the platform meets the needs of its users.\n\nDrive the semantic layer and metadata strategy that supports consistent and trusted self-service analytics and AI-driven data access.\n\nEvaluate technologies and approaches across streaming, storage, query, orchestration, and cloud infrastructure, balancing scalability, operational complexity, cost, and maintainability.\n\nCoach and mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, and reusable technical guidance.\n\nOwn the most complex architectural and operational challenges on the platform, including failure recovery, schema drift, partition management, and performance degradation.\n\nPlease apply if you have:\n7+ years of professional experience in data engineering, with meaningful time spent at a senior or staff level with domain-wide technical scope.\n\nExperience designing and operating lakehouse architectures at scale - including open table formats (e.g., Apache Iceberg), columnar storage (Parquet) and cloud object storage\n\nExperience building and operating streaming data pipelines - including event-driven ingestion, exactly-once delivery semantics, consumer lag management, checkpoint and recovery strategies, and failure handling in production environments.\n\nHands-on experience with data contracts, schema governance, metadata, or semantic-layer systems.\n\nStrong Python skills and a track record of writing maintainable, testable production code.\n\nExperience deploying and operating data workloads on Kubernetes - including managing containerized infrastructure, resource tuning and health checks.\n\nProven ability to influence multiple teams, communicate architectural trade-offs, and drive adoption.\n\nExperience mentoring engineers and raising technical standards through reviews, documentation, and reusable patterns.\n\nComfort taking ownership of broad, ambiguous problem spaces.\n\nTo stand out:\nDistributed query engines such as Trino.\n\nWorkflow orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow.\n\nExperience with AWS or an equivalent public cloud provider.\n\nCI/CD and deployment automation (e.g., GitHub Actions).\n\nWorking knowledge of Java or another JVM-based language, given the JVM-based nature of several frameworks in this domain.\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":6023,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"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":["Travel & Tourism"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-02T13:37:27Z"}],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":38,"reasons":["conf:12","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-03T01:50:54Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/kayak-staff-data-platform-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/kayak-staff-data-platform-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-03T01:50:54Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":1847,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":3153,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-04T00:00:00Z"}}}