Senior Engineering Manager, K4B

kayak; Concord (CA); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 235,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Work from almost anywhere for up to 20

Company-paid therapy sessions

HeadSpace subscription

Company-wide week off a year

No meeting Fridays

Paid parental leave

Generous vacation and birthday leave

Volunteer time

Development dollars

Leadership development

On-demand e-learnings

Travel discounts

Employee Resource Groups

Retirement and health plans

Free lunch 2 days a week

Quarterly events

Job summary

KAYAK for Business in Massachusetts is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead one or more agile teams delivering enterprise onboarding, account management and integration solutions. You will mentor engineers, own the team's technical roadmap, champion backend architecture, and ensure reliability, security, and quality through best practices.

This role requires 10+ years in software engineering with 5+ in leadership, experience with B2B SaaS, and the ability to coordinate across time zones

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in an engineering leadership or management role.
• Proven track record managing teams for 3+ years within B2B SaaS applications.
• Ownership and innovation in a data-driven environment with rapid domain learning.
• Experience steering organizational transformation and agile optimization.

Responsibilities

• Lead a cross-functional agile team delivering onboarding, account management and integration solutions with a designer and product owner.
• Mentor the team with technical guidance, performance feedback, and career development support.
• Own the team’s technical roadmap and align priorities with engineering leadership.
• Champion backend architecture decisions through design reviews and collaboration with technologists across engineering.
• Set and enforce engineering best practices for coding, testing, coverage, and deployment quality.
• Manage day-to-day team operations, remove blockers, balance backlog, ensure reliability and security.
• Collaborate with managers from other teams to resolve dependencies and support product teams.
• Monitor team health and delivery metrics, identify risks early and adjust priorities.

Skills

People management

Agile leadership

Cross-functional

Software architecture

Distributed systems

Mentoring

Hiring & onboarding

CI/CD

Observability

Stakeholder comms

Education

Degree in Computer Science

Tools

GitHub

Jira

Observability tools

Job description

KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG), is a leading travel search engine. With billions of queries across our platforms, we help people find their perfect flight, stay, rental car and vacation package. We're also transforming business travel with a new corporate travel solution, KAYAK for Business.

As an employee of KAYAK, you will be part of a travel company that operates a portfolio of global metasearch brands including momondo, Cheapflights and HotelsCombined, among others. From start-up to industry leader, innovation is in our DNA and every employee has an opportunity to make their mark. Our focus is on building the best travel search engine to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.

At KAYAK for Business, we're building the future of corporate travel technology — and the engineering teams behind it are at the heart of that mission. As a Senior Engineering Manager, you'll lead one or more agile engineering teams delivering software that helps companies and their travelers move smarter and with less friction, while playing a key role in shaping our growing engineering hub!

Note, this position is required to work from our Concord or Cambridge, MA office 3 days per week.

In this role, you will:

• Lead a cross functional agile team with both frontend and backend engineers, delivering a world class onboarding solution for customers, account management and integration management together with a designer and a product owner

• Mentor a team by providing technical guidance, performance feedback, and career development support.

• Own the team’s technical roadmap, aligning priorities with engineering leadership to support the broader platform strategy.

• Champion backend architecture decisions by leading design reviews and collaborating with technical leaders across engineering.

• Set and enforce engineering best practices for coding, testing, code coverage, and deployment quality.

• Manage day-to-day team operations by removing blockers, balancing the backlog, and maintaining high standards for reliability and security.

• Collaborate with engineering managers from other teams and cross-functional stakeholders to resolve dependencies and support product teams across the company.

• Monitor team health and delivery metrics, identifying risks early and adjusting priorities as needed.

• Champion agile practices and high impact engineering culture within the team

• Recruit and onboard frontend/backend engineering talent to support the platform roadmap.

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in an engineering leadership or management role directly managing software engineers, and a proven track record of leading productive teams and shipping high-quality software in a fast-paced environment; equivalent experience, training, or transferable skills considered.

• Proven track record of managing teams for 3+ years within B2B SaaS applications, focusing on successfully onboarding enterprise and SMB clients with measurable outcomes.

• Ownership and innovation within a data-driven, results-oriented environment, along with the ability to rapidly learn and master new business domains.

• Experience steering organizational transformation, maximizing gains from agile methodologies, and fostering process optimization and innovation

• Strong technical fundamentals in distributed systems, API design, and backend service architecture, with the ability to credibly guide architectural decisions and participate meaningfully in design reviews.

• Demonstrated experience owning the full people management lifecycle, including hiring, onboarding, performance management, career development, and promotions, with a strong track record of coaching and developing engineers at multiple levels through structured feedback, regular 1:1s, 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, with the ability to articulate a clear technical vision to both technical and non-technical audiences and collaborate effectively across product, design, and engineering functions.

• Hands-on experience with modern software development tooling — including version control systems (e.g., GitHub), issue tracking (e.g., Jira), and logging or observability platforms — and a demonstrated openness to adopting AI-assisted development tools to improve team productivity.

• Comfort working in a global engineering organization with teams across time zones and office locations.

• A degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience; no specific certification is required.

Benefits and Perks

• Work from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year

• Focus on mental health and well-being:

  • Company-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth

  • Company-paid subscription to HeadSpace

  • Company-wide week off a year – the whole team fully recharges (and returns without a pile-up of work!)

  • No meeting Fridays

• Paid parental leave

• Generous paid vacation + time off for your birthday

• Paid volunteer time

• Focus on your career growth:

  • Development Dollars

  • Leadership development

  • Access to thousands of on-demand e-learnings

• Travel Discounts

• Employee Resource Groups

• Competitive retirement and health plans

• Free lunch 2 days per week

• Fun quarterly events such as boat trips, arcades, ski trips, Thursday happy hours, and more

There are a variety of factors that go into determining a salary range, including but not limited to external market benchmark data, geographic location, and years of experience sought/required. The range for this Massachusetts based role is $190,000 - 235,000.00, not inclusive of annual bonus and recurring RSU grants.

We offer a competitive base salary and benefits including: health benefits; flexible spending account; retirement benefits; life insurance; paid time off (including PTO, paid sick leave, medical leave, bereavement leave, floating holidays and paid holidays); and parental leave benefits.

Inclusion

At KAYAK, we want everyone to have the space to grow, share ideas and do great work. That's why we're focused on hiring the best talent from all walks of life and experiences, supporting them well and making sure no one feels like they have to fit a mold to belong here.

Need any adjustments for the interview, application or on the job? No problem – just give us a heads-up. We've got you.