Engineering Manager, Berlin — Lead High-Impact Teams

Kayak; United States; Hybrid; USD 148,435 - 205,525; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Travel Discounts

Free lunch 2 days per week

Bike leasing program

Office in Friedrichshain, Berlin

Company-paid therapy sessions

Job summary

KAYAK is seeking a Senior Engineering Leader to drive end-to-end delivery for multiple agile squads. You will define technical roadmaps, enforce best practices, and lead hiring and growth for a team focused on scalable backend services and data-driven initiatives.

The role involves cross-functional collaboration, architecture influence, and building a high-velocity, quality-driven engineering culture at our Berlin hub.

Qualifications

• 3+ years leading engineering teams within travel industry or similar content integrations.
• 10+ years software engineering with at least 5 years in leadership.
• Data-driven with ownership and innovation mindset.
• Experience transforming organizations with agile methodologies.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems and backend service architecture.
• Experience owning the full people management lifecycle (hiring, onboarding, reviews).
• Proven ability to coach engineers at multiple levels and give structured feedback.
• Solid understanding of agile delivery, CI/CD, testing, observability.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management; able to present technical vision.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery for agile engineering teams, shipping high-quality software aligned with objectives.
• Define and drive the technical roadmap for the team's domain with PMs and leaders.
• Design and enforce engineering best practices and Definition of Done.
• Lead hiring and performance management for the team; manage lifecycle from sourcing to promotions.
• Coach engineers at all levels through 1:1s and career conversations.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with PMs, designers, and other managers to plan multi-team initiatives.
• Identify and remove delivery risks and drive improvements.
• Champion quality culture with blameless post-mortems and incident response.
• Influence architecture across the domain; participate in design reviews.
• Support engineering hub expansion and local talent acquisition.

Skills

Leadership

Delivery management

Agile

Hiring & coaching

Communication

Distributed systems

API design

Backend architecture

CI/CD

Observability

Eng leadership

Education

Bachelor’s in CS or related

Tools

GitHub

Jira

Logging/Observability tools

Job description

KAYAK is seeking a Senior Engineering Leader to drive end-to-end delivery for multiple agile squads. You will define technical roadmaps, enforce best practices, and lead hiring and growth for a team focused on scalable backend services and data-driven initiatives.

The role involves cross-functional collaboration, architecture influence, and building a high-velocity, quality-driven engineering culture at our Berlin hub.