Principal Software Architect

The role

You will define the long-term technical vision and architecture strategy for the KAYAK for Business engineering organisation. This senior individual contributor role involves overseeing system design, leading major technical initiatives, and mentoring senior engineers across multiple teams.

What you will do

• Define and own the long-term technical vision and architecture strategy for KAYAK for Business.
• Oversee the design of reliable, scalable, secure, extensible, and maintainable systems.
• Lead major technical initiatives that span multiple engineering teams.
• Lead architectural discovery for new projects including evaluating options and producing design documents.
• Present architecture proposals to engineering leadership and cross-functional teams.
• Identify and address architectural risks, technical debt, performance issues, and operational gaps.
• Establish engineering standards for reliability, observability, recoverability, security, and maintainability.
• Mentor senior engineers and technical leaders through design discussions, documentation, code review, and pairing.
• Contribute to cross-team architectural alignment.

Required qualifications

• Proven experience designing scalable architectures for e-commerce systems.
• Strong proficiency in Java or another JVM-based language.
• A track record of leading architectural design work across multiple teams.
• Proven ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams without relying on direct authority.
• Experience with observability and production operations.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English.

Nice to have

• Experience in the travel technology domain, including familiarity with booking flows, order management, or integrations with travel distribution systems.
• Experience with B2B integration and identity standards, including service-to-service authentication and enterprise identity platforms.
• Experience integrating AI or machine learning capabilities into production backend systems.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures, message queues, or asynchronous processing patterns.
• Experience working in a service-oriented monorepo environment.

Benefits

• Work from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year
• Funds for your career growth
• Access to thousands of on-demand e-learnings
• Generous additional Health Insurance
• Flexible sick time off
• Additional financial support for your sick leave
• Additional day off on your birthday
• Company-wide vacation week once a year (winter holidays)
• Additional financial support during parental leave
• Free lunch twice a week and daily snacks at the office
• Free yoga twice a week
• Paid volunteering time

Before you apply

• Offers of employment are conditioned upon satisfactory completion of all required pre-employment screenings, including a background check.

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.