Machine Learning Engineer Manager

The role

You will lead a Berlin-based team to develop and evolve a shared Machine Learning Platform. You will own the technical direction, roadmap, and delivery of infrastructure and developer workflows for model production.

What you will do

• Own the strategy and roadmap for the shared Machine Learning Platform.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a Berlin-based team of Machine Learning Platform Engineers.
• Drive technical direction across platform architecture and the ML lifecycle.
• Build and evolve shared ML capabilities including training orchestration, model serving, feature management, and LLM workflows.
• Champion platform reliability and operational excellence.
• Define clear ownership boundaries between the platform team and downstream teams.
• Collaborate with Data Science, Engineering, and Operations teams to deliver multi-team initiatives.

Required qualifications

• Strong technical foundations in software engineering, machine learning, and systems design.
• Significant hands-on experience building and operating production ML systems, platforms, or infrastructure.
• At least 5 years of experience with ML lifecycle systems including training orchestration, model serving, feature management, and monitoring.
• Meaningful people leadership experience including hiring, coaching, and performance management.
• Strong ownership, judgment, and systems thinking.
• Ability to lead across organizational boundaries.
• Fluency with AI-assisted workflows.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with Python, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, Kafka, AWS, Airflow, and Trino.
• Experience building LLM or agent workflows, including prompt or dataset-processing pipelines

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