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 seeking a Staff Product Designer, Mobile to own the design direction across our apps and lead the craft of every designer who works on them. This is a senior individual contributor role with manager-level scope: you carry the design direction and UX/UI patterns across three teams (Apps Meta, Apps Retention, and Mobile Design Systems) while still designing and shipping yourself. You set the quality bar for all Apps design output, you hold it across teams, and you keep engineering pointed at the right work. You are the technical lead for apps design, accountable for the quality and velocity of what the apps designers produce, without managing them directly. This role is required to work from our Berlin office 3 days per week. In this role, you will: Own the design direction and the UX/UI pattern system across the apps surface. Navigation, mental models, and UI consistency cut across Apps Meta, Retention, and Design Systems at once, and you hold that cross-cutting direction so three teams ship one coherent experience rather than three versions of it. Set the quality standard for apps design and hold it as a discipline, not a project. Make the bar visible where teams miss it, and close gaps across teams that you did not personally create. You are accountable for the quality and velocity of all apps design output. Run planning and discovery for all three teams. Break multi-team, loosely defined problems into clear design direction the designers can run with. Partner with the Director of Product for Apps and the apps PMs on core initiatives, influencing roadmap and prioritization through design rationale. Lead native craft across iOS and Android. Set the approach for resizability, foldables, new screen sizes, and solve how KAYAK responds to platform chrome shifts like Liquid Glass and Material 3 Expressive. Lead the design approach for mobile AI features: how we integrate AI into the apps, the UI, and the navigation around it, so it lands as a native part of the experience. Drive the brand differentiation work for our portfolio of hero brands apps like momondo to ensure local market dominance. Raise the ceiling for the other apps designers through critique, shared standards, and patterns they build on. Designers should get better by working alongside you and using what you establish, not only through direct mentorship. Required Skills 10+ years in product design, with a portfolio of shipped, high-impact mobile work at consumer scale. Deep native expertise across iOS and Android. Mastery of Apple HIG and Material Design, and the judgment to know when to converge and when to honor platform difference. Hands-on experience with resizability, foldables, and iPad, and a point of view on platform chrome directions like Liquid Glass and Material 3 Expressive. A track record of raising design quality across a discipline beyond your own projects, through standards you set, critiques you ran, or systems others still use. Experience driving design direction across multiple teams or product areas, with the ability to influence without authority. Experience building or evolving mobile design systems and scalable patterns. Strong with Figma, and fluent with AI-assisted design and prototyping tooling (for example Claude Code or Cursor). Comfort using data and research to set direction and measure outcomes. Please apply if you have: Experience managing or leading designers. This is an IC role, so it counts as a strong plus rather than a requirement. Driven design vision across teams in a way you can tie to outcomes, not just deliverables. Formal education in design (BA, BFA, MFA) or equivalent practical experience.