Staff Data Platform Engineer

The role

You will design and evolve the architecture of the shared Data Platform. This includes near-real-time streaming, lakehouse storage, schema management, and distributed query infrastructure.

What you will do

• Design and evolve the architecture of the shared Data Platform
• Deliver high-impact platform initiatives end-to-end
• Define and promote technical standards for data contracts, schema evolution, and ingestion patterns
• Develop reusable patterns and reference architectures
• Establish reliable observability across the platform
• Collaborate with Operations, Security, Engineering, Data Engineering, Data Science, and Analytics
• Drive the semantic layer and metadata strategy
• Evaluate technologies across streaming, storage, query, orchestration, and cloud infrastructure
• Coach and mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing
• Own complex architectural and operational challenges

Required qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience in data engineering
• Experience at a senior or staff level with domain-wide technical scope
• Experience designing and operating lakehouse architectures at scale including Apache Iceberg, Parquet, and cloud object storage
• Experience building and operating streaming data pipelines
• Hands-on experience with data contracts, data governance, metadata, or semantic-layer systems
• Strong Python skills
• Experience deploying and operating data workloads on Kubernetes
• Ability to influence multiple teams and communicate architectural trade-offs
• Experience mentoring engineers
• Comfort taking ownership of broad, ambiguous problem spaces

Nice to have

• Distributed query engines such as Trino
• Experience with Kafka, Flink, or comparable streaming technologies
• Workflow orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow
• Experience with AWS or an equivalent public cloud provider
• CI/CD and deployment automation (e.g., GitHub Actions)
• Working knowledge of Java or another JVM-based language

Benefits

• Work from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year
• Company-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth
• Company-paid subscription to HeadSpace
• Company-wide week off a year
• No meeting Fridays
• Paid parental leave
• Paid volunteer time
• Development Dollars
• Leadership development
• Access to thousands of on-demand e-learnings
• Travel Discounts
• Employee Resource Groups

About the company

KAYAK is a leading travel search engine and part of Booking Holdings. It operates a portfolio of global metasearch brands including momondo, Cheapflights and HotelsCombined.