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KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings, is a leading travel search engine processing billions of queries across global metasearch brands including momondo, Cheapflights, and HotelsCombined. This Senior Software Engineer role focuses on building and maintaining production software for KAYAK's AI-assisted travel search and trip-planning experiences.
You will design, implement, and maintain reliable backend services and APIs supporting conversational travel planning, AI-generated content, smart filters, and personalized search experiences. Key responsibilities include investigating technical problems, assessing trade-offs, and implementing practical solutions that improve reliability, performance, and maintainability. You'll write automated tests across unit, integration, and end-to-end levels, participate in code reviews, and collaborate with engineers, product managers, and designers to clarify requirements and deliver accessible user experiences.
The role emphasizes making AI-assisted features dependable, transparent, and useful to travelers. You'll contribute to features like ASK AI, smart filters, AI-generated hotel review summaries, and Explore search experiences. Additional responsibilities include monitoring and improving production behavior through debugging and observability, learning unfamiliar systems, sharing knowledge through documentation and pairing, and contributing to the evolution of development tools and engineering processes.
Required qualifications include experience building and maintaining production software, proficiency in Java or another relevant programming language, familiarity with APIs and software-design principles, experience testing software and investigating production issues, and the ability to explain technical decisions clearly. You should demonstrate ownership of assigned work while seeking input when needed, and have contributed to projects from design through implementation, release, and maintenance.
Desirable experience includes distributed systems, search, personalization, high-volume consumer products, AI/ML or LLM applications, relational databases, web or mobile products, travel-related products, Java with Spring, cloud services, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing frameworks. The role requires commuting to the Berlin office 3 times per week.
