SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: EUR 54,000 - 80,004 / annual
KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings, is seeking a Staff Engineer for its Platform Team to design and evolve core backend infrastructure, frameworks, and runtime systems that power the organization's engineering teams. This is a hybrid role based in Kaunas (3 days/week in office) focused on modernizing backend architecture, deployment patterns, and observability across a large-scale distributed system handling billions of travel search queries.
Key responsibilities include designing shared backend platform capabilities and frameworks adopted consistently across teams; driving backend platform direction around Java code structure, service architecture, and standardization of Spring Boot-based services; improving deployment quality and developer velocity through better CI/CD workflows and production-ready release practices; contributing to platform roadmap items such as multi-cluster deployment, faster pod startup, on-demand test environments, and AI-driven observability; and mentoring engineers through design reviews and hands-on technical leadership on complex platform initiatives.
Required qualifications: 6+ years of backend or platform engineering experience (preferably Java or similar ecosystem) with strong distributed systems design and operations; deep hands-on Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure expertise; strong understanding of backend service architecture, API design, and shared platform tradeoffs; experience improving CI/CD practices, deployment quality gates, and test quality; observability and reliability mindset with practical monitoring and troubleshooting experience; track record of leading through influence and aligning multiple teams around technical direction; and strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.
Preferred: Spring/Spring Boot and modern JVM performance practices; experience with multi-cluster deployment models, zero-trust service communication, Kubernetes-hosted developer environments, or ephemeral test environments.
Compensation includes base pay of €4,500–€6,667 gross monthly, ~10% yearly bonus, and €20,000 gross RSU package with potential yearly refreshes. Benefits include up to 20 days/year remote work flexibility, career development funds, generous health insurance, flexible sick time, birthday day off, company vacation week, parental leave support, free lunch twice weekly, yoga, paid volunteering time, no-meeting Fridays, and company-paid wellness subscriptions.
