Senior Java Software Engineer, Platform Team

About the role

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.

THE ROLE

Our Backend Platform team builds and maintains the core infrastructure, frameworks, and runtime systems that every engineering team at KAYAK relies on. We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join us in Kaunas and help evolve these shared foundations — improving how we deploy, observe, and scale our services so that product teams across the company can ship faster and more safely. You'll collaborate closely with teammates on technical decisions, contribute to meaningful platform improvements, and grow alongside a supportive group of experienced engineers.

This role requires working from our Kaunas office at least 3 days per week.

IN THIS ROLE YOU WILL:

- Contribute to the evolution of shared backend platform capabilities, frameworks, and runtime patterns that engineering teams across the company can adopt consistently.

- Help shape backend platform direction around Java code structure, service architecture, and standardisation of common runtime patterns such as Spring Boot–based services.

- Improve deployment quality and developer velocity by designing better CI/CD workflows, pull-request quality gates, and production-ready release practices.

- Contribute to platform roadmap initiatives such as web gateways, multi-cluster deployment, faster pod startup, on-demand test environments, secure service-to-service communication, and AI-driven observability.

- Partner with product engineering teams to understand their infrastructure needs and translate those into platform improvements.

- Participate in design reviews, share knowledge with colleagues, and help raise the overall quality of the team's technical output.

PLEASE APPLY IF YOU HAVE:

- 4+ years of backend or platform engineering experience, preferably in Java or a similar ecosystem, with strong experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale.

- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes or similar container orchestration tools and cloud-native infrastructure.

- Solid understanding of backend service architecture, API design, and the trade-offs involved in building shared engineering platforms.

- Experience improving CI/CD pipelines, deployment processes, or test quality in production environments.