At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time
- Workplace
- Hybrid
- Location
- Kaunas · Vilnius
About the role
- KAYAK is looking for a Principal Software Architect to help define the long-term technical vision and architecture strategy for the entire KAYAK for Business engineering organisation.
- This is a senior individual contributor role with broad influence across multiple engineering teams, working at the intersection of distributed systems, external integrations, and AI-driven product experiences.
Responsibilities
- Define and own the long-term technical vision and architecture strategy for KAYAK for Business, spanning search, booking, servicing, AI, identity, and enterprise integrations.
- Oversee the design of reliable, scalable, secure, extensible, and maintainable systems across the K4B platform.
- Lead major technical initiatives that span multiple engineering teams, building alignment through clear communication and connecting technical priorities to business goals.
- Lead architectural discovery for new projects: evaluate technical options, define system boundaries and integration points, run proofs of concept where needed, and produce clear design documents (RFCs, ADRs) for review.
- Present architecture proposals to engineering leadership and cross-functional teams, facilitating collaborative decision-making on high-impact technical changes.
- Identify and address architectural risks, technical debt, performance issues, and operational gaps across the K4B platform; propose and drive improvements that increase system stability and developer productivity.
- Establish engineering standards for reliability, observability, recoverability, security, and maintainability across K4B engineering.
- Mentor senior engineers and technical leaders across the business unit, sharing knowledge through design discussions, documentation, code review, and pairing.
- Contribute to cross-team architectural alignment, working with other engineering teams to agree on shared patterns, contracts, and infrastructure.
Requirements
- Proven experience designing scalable architectures for e-commerce systems.
- Strong proficiency in Java or another JVM-based language, with a solid understanding of how to build reliable, observable, and maintainable services.
- A track record of leading architectural design work across multiple teams: producing design documents, facilitating technical reviews, and guiding teams through complex implementation decisions.
- Proven ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams through communication, collaboration, and sound decision-making - without relying on direct authority.
- Experience with observability and production operations - you understand how to instrument systems, interpret logs and metrics, and respond to production incidents.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills in English; you can explain complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- A collaborative approach to technical leadership - you influence through clarity, shared understanding, and sound reasoning.
Benefits
- Significant yearly bonuses, approx 10 percent of annual salary
- Booking Holdings RSU (Restricted Stock Units) package, worth 40000 USD gross, with possibility to receive yearly refreshes
- Work from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year
- Access to thousands of on-demand e-learnings
- Generous additional Health Insurance
- Flexible sick time off
- Additional financial support for your sick leave
- Additional day off on your birthday
- Company-wide vacation week once a year (winter holidays)
Workplace
- This role is required to work from our Kaunas or Vilnius office at least 3 days per week.
Skills
- Java
- JVM
