Machine Learning Engineering Manager

About the role

KAYAK is seeking a Machine Learning Engineering Manager to lead the development and evolution of its shared Machine Learning Platform. This is a senior, hands-on technical leadership role where you will own the technical direction, roadmap, and delivery while building self-service capabilities for training, deployment, serving, and monitoring. You will lead a Berlin-based team to build the shared infrastructure and developer workflows that take models from experimentation to reliable production.

Responsibilities

• Own the strategy and roadmap for KAYAK’s shared Machine Learning Platform, aligning technical investments with business needs and long-term platform evolution.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing Berlin-based team of Machine Learning Platform Engineers, fostering technical excellence, autonomy, and operational accountability.
• Drive technical direction across platform architecture and the ML lifecycle, contributing hands-on to high-impact problems and simplifying legacy systems where it creates clear value.
• Build and evolve shared ML capabilities, including training orchestration, model serving, feature management, and LLM workflows, improving developer experience and enabling teams to deliver production-ready ML solutions efficiently.
• Champion platform reliability and operational excellence, establishing robust monitoring, alerting, incident response, and production-readiness standards.
• Define clear ownership boundaries so the platform team owns shared infrastructure and lifecycle tooling, while downstream teams own use-case-specific model and business logic.
• Collaborate with Data Science, Engineering, and Operations teams to plan and deliver complex, multi-team initiatives, ensuring clear alignment on scope, dependencies, and timelines.

Required skills

• Software engineering
• Machine learning
• Systems design
• ML lifecycle systems
• Training orchestration
• Model serving
• Feature management
• People leadership

Nice to have

• Python
• Kubernetes
• GitHub Actions
• Kafka
• AWS
• Airflow
• Trino
• LLM workflows
• Agent workflows

Qualifications

• Significant hands-on experience building and operating production ML systems, platforms, or infrastructure

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
• 6 weeks paid vacation
• Pension plan contributions

About the Company

KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings, is the world's leading travel search engine. The company operates a portfolio of global metasearch brands including momondo, Cheapflights and HotelsCombined.