About the role
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. 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 looking for a Staff Engineer with deep backend and platform engineering expertise and extensive experience designing large-scale distributed systems.
The role is focused on evolving the core infrastructure, frameworks, and runtime systems that product engineering teams depend on, while modernizing backend architecture, deployment patterns, and observability. If you're a clear, collaborative communicator who can simplify complex platform problems into pragmatic architecture, thrives in cross-team technical leadership, and enjoys building infrastructure that makes the whole engineering organization faster and safer to ship — we'd love to hear from you! This role will be required to work from our Kaunas office 3 days per week. In this role you will: Design and evolve shared backend platform capabilities, frameworks, and runtime patterns that can be adopted consistently across engineering teams. Help drive backend platform direction around Java code structure, service architecture, and standardisation of common runtime patterns such as Spring Boot–based services. Improve deployment quality and developer velocity by shaping better CI/CD workflows, PR quality gates, and production-ready release practices. Contribute to platform roadmap items such as Webgates, multi-cluster deployment, faster pod startup, on-demand test environments, secure service-to-service communication and AI driven observability. Mentor engineers through design reviews, architecture guidance, and hands-on technical leadership on complex platform initiatives. Please apply if you have: 6+ years of backend or platform engineering experience preferably in Java, or a similar ecosystem, with strong experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale. Deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure. Strong understanding of backend service architecture, API and service design, and the tradeoffs involved in building shared engineering platforms. Experience improving CI/CD practices, deployment quality gates, release engineering, and test quality in production systems. A strong observability and reliability mindset, with practical experience in monitoring, troubleshooting, and improving operational excellence. A track record of leading through influence, writing and reviewing technical proposals, and aligning multiple teams around platform direction and standards. Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with engineering leaders, product teams, and cross-functional stakeholders. Experience with Spring/Spring Boot and modern JVM performance practices is a plus. Experience with multi-cluster deployment models, zero-trust service communication, Kubernetes-hosted developer environments, or ephemeral test environments is a plus.