Engineering Manager — Lead Scalable Backend & Quality

Kayak; Concord (MA); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 235,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Work from anywhere

Mental health support

No meetings Fridays

Paid parental leave

Generous vacation

Learning and development budget

Travel discounts

Job summary

Kayak, part of Booking Holdings, seeks an Engineering Manager to lead agile teams delivering scalable backend services from the Concord, MA office. You will mentor engineers, own the team roadmap, and champion quality, reliability, and secure deployments.

You’ll collaborate across product and engineering to advance platform strategy and drive improvements in process and tooling. The role emphasizes ownership of people and technical growth, with a focus on high-impact delivery in a fast-paced,

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with 5+ years in a leadership or management role.
• Proven track record of managing teams for 3+ years in B2B SaaS applications.
• Experience owning the people management lifecycle: hiring, onboarding, performance reviews, and career development.
• Data-driven, results-oriented with ability to drive innovation and organizational transformation.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, API design, and backend service architecture; CI/CD and observability practices.

Responsibilities

• Lead cross-functional agile teams focused on sustaining and operational quality.
• Mentor team with technical guidance, performance feedback, and career development support.
• Own the team’s technical roadmap aligning priorities with engineering leadership.
• Champion backend architecture decisions and drive design reviews across engineering.
• Set and enforce engineering best practices for coding, testing, and deployment quality.
• Manage day-to-day operations, remove blockers, balance backlog, and ensure reliability and security.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Team mentoring

Agile delivery

Distributed systems

API design

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

GitHub

Jira

Job description

Kayak, part of Booking Holdings, seeks an Engineering Manager to lead agile teams delivering scalable backend services from the Concord, MA office. You will mentor engineers, own the team roadmap, and champion quality, reliability, and secure deployments.

You’ll collaborate across product and engineering to advance platform strategy and drive improvements in process and tooling. The role emphasizes ownership of people and technical growth, with a focus on high-impact delivery in a fast-paced,