SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: EUR 39,960 - 79,920 / annual
KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings, is seeking a Senior Java Software Engineer to join the Backend Platform team in Kaunas. The platform team builds and maintains core infrastructure, frameworks, and runtime systems that enable engineering teams across the company to deploy, observe, and scale services efficiently.
In this role, you will contribute to the evolution of shared backend platform capabilities and frameworks that product teams adopt consistently. You'll help shape backend platform direction around Java code structure, service architecture, and standardization of common runtime patterns such as Spring Boot-based services. Key responsibilities include improving deployment quality and developer velocity by designing better CI/CD workflows, pull-request quality gates, and production-ready release practices.
You'll contribute to platform roadmap initiatives including web gateways, multi-cluster deployment, faster pod startup, on-demand test environments, secure service-to-service communication, and AI-driven observability. You'll partner with product engineering teams to understand infrastructure needs and translate those into platform improvements, participate in design reviews, and help raise the overall quality of the team's technical output.
Required qualifications include 4+ years of backend or platform engineering experience, preferably in Java or similar ecosystems, with strong experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale. You should have hands-on experience with Kubernetes or similar container orchestration tools and cloud-native infrastructure, solid understanding of backend service architecture and API design, and experience improving CI/CD pipelines and deployment processes. A strong observability and reliability mindset with practical experience in monitoring and troubleshooting is essential, along with good communication skills and professional English proficiency.
Nice-to-have skills include experience with Spring/Spring Boot, modern JVM performance practices, multi-cluster deployment models, zero-trust service communication, and Kubernetes-hosted developer environments. The role requires working from the Kaunas office at least 3 days per week.
