Staff Data Platform Engineer

About the role

KAYAK is looking for a Staff Data Engineer to join the Data Platform team and shape the shared foundation that powers analytics, machine learning, and AI-driven experiences. As a senior individual contributor, you will design and evolve the architecture for moving, storing, and governing data at scale. You will turn ambiguity into clear technical direction while enabling downstream teams to build faster and with greater confidence.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve the architecture of the shared Data Platform, including streaming, lakehouse storage, and distributed query infrastructure.
• Deliver high-impact platform initiatives end-to-end from architecture design through implementation and operational handoff.
• Define and promote technical standards for data contracts, schema evolution, and ingestion patterns.
• Develop reusable patterns and reference architectures for streaming ingestion, observability, and data governance.
• Establish reliable observability across the platform, including pipeline monitoring and data quality checks.
• Drive the semantic layer and metadata strategy to support consistent self-service analytics.
• Coach and mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and technical guidance.

Required skills

• Data engineering
• Lakehouse architectures
• Apache Iceberg
• Parquet
• Streaming data pipelines
• Data contracts
• Schema governance
• Python
• Kubernetes

Nice to have

• Trino
• Apache Airflow
• AWS
• CI/CD
• GitHub Actions
• Java

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience in data engineering

Benefits

• Work from anywhere for up to 20 days per year
• Company-paid therapy sessions
• HeadSpace subscription
• Company-wide week off
• No meeting Fridays
• Paid parental leave
• Paid volunteer time
• Development Dollars
• Travel Discounts
• 6 weeks paid vacation

About the Company

KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings, is a leading travel search engine that helps people find flights, stays, rental cars, and vacation packages. The company operates a portfolio of global metasearch brands including momondo, Cheapflights, and HotelsCombined.