KAYAK
Senior Software Engineer
Cambridge Office · Senior
Sponsorship not specified$140k-$160kDetected 25 days ago
JavaHTMLCSSBackend DevelopmentFull-Stack DevelopmentCode ReviewSQLMySQLRESTIncident ResponseCRMLeadership
About the role
- 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.
- KAYAK is seeking a Senior Java Software Engineer to join our Retention and CRM team!
Responsibilities
- Design and deliver scalable, high-quality backend services across both Retention and CRM - including systems that power the Trips product, user re-engagement features, and large-scale email and push notification pipelines.
- Develop and improve backend services handling bulk and transactional messaging at scale, ensuring reliability and performance across millions of sends.
- Build and maintain backend features that drive user retention - including Trips functionality, price alerts, and personalized engagement touchpoints that bring travelers back to KAYAK.
- Architect and maintain robust integrations with third-party APIs and marketing platforms, ensuring data integrity and scalability across the email and retention stack.
- Lead the design of complex features end-to-end - from technical scoping and architecture decisions through deployment, monitoring, and production support.
- Debug and optimize full-stack solutions, proactively identifying performance bottlenecks, data pipeline failures, and production issues - and driving them to resolution.
- Coach and mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and knowledge sharing, helping to raise the technical bar for the team.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams including product managers, marketing specialists, designers, and globally distributed engineers to translate business requirements into well-engineered solutions.
Requirements
- This role is required to work from either our Cambridge or Concord, MA office 3 days per week.
Compensation
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of delivering high-quality, production-grade backend systems in a fast-paced environment.
- Strong, proven programming skills in Java, with the ability to independently design, implement, and own complex backend features end to end.
- Solid experience with APIs and SQL - including designing and consuming RESTful APIs and working with relational databases such as MySQL or similar systems.
- Experience leading the design and delivery of complex technical solutions, including making architectural tradeoffs and owning features through deployment and ongoing operations.
- Experience collaborating cross-functionally with product managers, marketing partners, designers, and globally distributed engineering teams to ship impactful features.
- Ability to manage multiple priorities and adapt to changing needs without requiring close direction, balancing sprint commitments with longer-term technical work.
- Work from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year
Benefits
- Paid parental leave
- Generous paid vacation + time off for your birthday
This listing is sourced directly from KAYAK's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.