Senior Engineering Manager, K4B

About the role

This position involves leading agile engineering teams dedicated to building the future of corporate travel technology. You will guide the development of software solutions that enhance business travel efficiency and reduce friction for companies and their employees. This role is central to expanding our engineering presence in Berlin.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Oversee the complete delivery cycle for one or more agile engineering teams, ensuring consistent shipment of high-quality software that meets product and business goals, measured by key performance indicators.
• Establish and guide the technical roadmap for your team's area, collaborating with product managers and fellow engineering leaders to convert business objectives into a prioritized, actionable plan.
• Implement and uphold engineering best practices across the team's codebase, including coding standards, testing methods, observability, and clear completion criteria, thereby improving overall quality.
• Manage hiring and performance for software engineers, covering the entire employee journey from sourcing and onboarding to career development, performance reviews, and promotions.
• Mentor and develop engineers at all levels, including senior engineers and emerging technical leads, through regular one-on-one meetings, structured feedback, and targeted career discussions to cultivate future leaders.
• Work across departments with product managers, designers, and other 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 drive improvements independently to maintain high 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 choices, and ensuring systems are built for scalability, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Contribute to building and shaping the engineering presence by assisting with local talent acquisition, onboarding, and team culture as part of the organization's strategic growth of its engineering hub.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience managing engineering teams in the travel industry, focusing on supplier integrations (such as flights, hotels, or trains using Direct APIs, GDS, NDC, NDC[X]) or overseeing teams that implement large-scale third-party content integrations.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in an engineering leadership or management role directly managing software engineers, demonstrating a history of leading productive teams and delivering high-quality software in a fast-paced setting; equivalent experience, training, or transferable skills will be considered.
• A proven record of ownership and innovation in a data-driven, results-oriented environment, coupled with the ability to quickly learn and master new business domains.
• Experience guiding organizational transformation, maximizing benefits from agile methodologies, and fostering process optimization and innovation.
• Strong technical foundations 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 genuine dedication to nurturing engineering talent.
• Experience coaching and developing engineers at various levels, including senior engineers and aspiring technical leads, through structured feedback, regular one-on-one meetings, and deliberate career discussions.
• 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 abilities, 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, with a demonstrated willingness to adopt AI-assisted development tools to enhance 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

Benefits highlights: Up to 20 days per year work from almost anywhere, company-paid therapy sessions via SpringHealth, HeadSpace subscription, company-wide week off annually, no meeting Fridays, paid parental leave, paid volunteer time, development dollars, leadership development, access to e-learnings, travel discounts, employee resource groups, 6 weeks paid vacation plus birthday day off, free lunch 2 days per week, pension plan contributions, public transportation subsidies, bike leasing program, monthly social events, Thursday happy hours, sports teams, office in Friedrichshain, Berlin.

Application notes: KAYAK supports diversity and inclusion, providing adjustments for interviews, applications, or on the job as needed.