Engineering Manager, Flights Meta

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.

As 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.

KAYAK is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the Flights Meta Backend team within our Meta Search business unit.. This team owns backend leadership for flight-vertical decisions and issues, and works across flight search systems, endpoints, experiments, observability, and production operations in close partnership with Product, frontend engineering, QA, and Design.

This is a role for a balanced people manager with strong backend technical depth—someone who enjoys coaching engineers, strengthening delivery and operational quality, and partnering cross-functionally to ship reliable, high-impact features for the Flights business.

• Lead and mentor a team of backend engineers, providing technical guidance, performance feedback, and career development support.

• Own the team’s technical roadmap and align priorities with Flights product goals, technical health, and the broader Meta Search strategy.

• Drive backend architecture and engineering decisions across the flight search domain, including APIs, service architecture, quality, scalability, and maintainability.

• Partner closely with the Flights Product Manager, Flights Meta frontend engineering leadership, QA, and Design to plan and deliver complex cross-functional work.

• Ensure features are properly refined before sprint commitment, with clear Definition of Done, visible ownership, and strong coordination across backend and frontend work streams.

• Improve execution by reducing blockers, strengthening developer handoffs, and avoiding unnecessary waterfall patterns between backend and frontend delivery.

• Raise the bar on production readiness through strong practices in testing, code coverage, monitoring, logging, performance validation, and operational readiness.

• Support reliable operation of the Flights business by helping the team respond effectively to incidents, use production tooling well, and communicate clearly during high-severity issues.

• Foster a collaborative and inclusive team culture that encourages accountability, knowledge sharing, continuous improvement, and high engineering standards.

• Recruit, onboard, and grow backend engineering talent to support the Flights Meta roadmap over time.

• 8+ years of backend or platform software development experience, with strong knowledge of distributed systems and service architecture.

• A degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience.

• Experience leading or managing backend engineers, with a strong track record in coaching, performance management, and team development.

• Strong technical fundamentals in API design, backend frameworks, software architecture, and modern engineering best practices.

• Confidence with observability and monitoring tools, and a track record of improving reliability and operational excellence.

• Strong project leadership skills, including the ability to prioritize across roadmap work, technical debt, and cross-team dependencies.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering, product, design, and business stakeholders.

• Professional proficiency in written and spoken English.

• Experience with Java and modern backend frameworks in production environments is strongly preferred.

• Experience leading teams in agile development environments, including sprint planning, refinement, and cross-functional delivery, is strongly preferred.

• Experience working on search, booking, or other high-throughput systems is a strong plus.

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.

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