Engineering Manager, K4B

About the role

Join KAYAK for Business to lead engineering teams developing corporate travel technology. This role involves guiding agile teams to deliver software that streamlines business travel. You will contribute to the growth of our engineering hub and shape its future.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Oversee end-to-end software delivery for one or more agile engineering teams, ensuring high-quality releases that meet product and business goals, measured by KPIs.
• Define and guide the technical roadmap for your team's area, collaborating with product managers and other engineering leaders to create a prioritized, actionable plan from business objectives.
• Establish and enforce engineering best practices for the team's codebase, including coding standards, testing methods, observability, and clear completion criteria, raising overall quality.
• Manage the hiring and performance of software engineers, covering the entire employee lifecycle from sourcing and onboarding to career development, reviews, and promotions.
• Mentor and develop engineers at all levels, including senior staff and emerging technical leads, through regular one-on-one meetings, structured feedback, and targeted career discussions.
• Work across departments with product managers, designers, and peer engineering managers to plan and execute complex, multi-team projects, ensuring clear alignment on scope, dependencies, and timelines.
• Proactively identify and resolve delivery risks, whether organizational, technical, or process-related, and implement improvements to maintain team velocity.
• Promote a culture of quality and continuous improvement, integrating practices such as blameless post-mortems, structured incident response, and iterative process refinement into daily operations.
• Influence technical architecture within your team's domain by preparing for and participating in design reviews, guiding architectural decisions, and ensuring systems are built for scalability, reliability, and long-term maintenance.
• Help build and shape the engineering presence by contributing to local talent acquisition, onboarding, and team culture as part of the organization's strategic expansion.

Requirements

• At least 1 year of experience leading engineering teams in the travel sector, focusing on supplier integrations (flights, hotels, trains via Direct APIs, GDS, NDC, NDC[X]), or managing teams handling large-scale third-party content integrations.
• A minimum of 8 years in software engineering, with at least 3 years in an engineering leadership or management role directly overseeing software engineers, demonstrating success in leading productive teams and delivering high-quality software in a fast-paced setting; equivalent experience, training, or transferable skills are considered.
• Proven track record of ownership and innovation in a data-driven, results-oriented environment, with the ability to quickly learn new business areas.
• Experience driving organizational transformation, maximizing benefits from agile methodologies, and fostering process optimization and innovation.
• Strong technical foundation in distributed systems, API design, and backend service architecture, enabling credible guidance on architectural decisions and meaningful participation in design reviews.
• Demonstrated experience managing the full people management lifecycle: hiring, onboarding, performance management, career development, and promotions, with a commitment to developing engineering talent.
• Experience coaching and developing engineers at various levels, including senior engineers and emerging technical leads, through structured feedback, regular one-on-one meetings, and deliberate career conversations.
• Solid understanding of agile delivery methodologies and the software development lifecycle, including CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and observability practices; comfortable driving process improvements within a sprint-based team.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, capable of articulating a clear technical vision to both technical and non-technical audiences and collaborating effectively across product, design, and engineering functions.
• Professional fluency in written and spoken English.
• Hands-on experience with modern software development tools, including version control systems (e.g., GitHub), issue tracking (e.g., Jira), and logging or observability platforms, and an openness to adopting AI-assisted development tools to boost team productivity.
• Comfortable working in a distributed, multilingual engineering organization with teams across multiple time zones and office locations.
• A degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience; no specific certification is required.

Practical notes

You can work remotely for up to 20 days per year. Benefits include company-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth, a HeadSpace subscription, and a company-wide week off annually. Enjoy no-meeting Fridays, paid parental leave, and paid volunteer time. Career growth is supported by Development Dollars, leadership development, and access to e-learning. Travel discounts and Employee Resource Groups are available. You receive 6 weeks of paid vacation plus a birthday day off, free lunch two days a week, pension plan contributions, public transportation subsidies, and a bike leasing program. Social events, Thursday happy hours, and sports teams are part of the culture. The office is located in Friedrichshain, Berlin. We welcome applications from diverse backgrounds and provide adjustments for interviews or on the job if needed.