Senior Engineering Manager, K4B
Berlin · 3+ years experience · Full-time · Hybrid · Posted Oct 13, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 3+ years experience
- Employment
- Full-time
- Workplace
- Hybrid
- Location
- Berlin
About the role
- At KAYAK for Business, we're building the future of corporate travel technology — and the engineering teams behind it are at the heart of that mission.
- As a Sr. Engineering Manager, you'll lead one or more agile engineering teams delivering software that helps companies and their travelers move smarter and with less friction, while playing a key role in shaping our growing engineering hub.
Responsibilities
- Own end-to-end delivery for one or more agile engineering teams, ensuring the team consistently ships high-quality software aligned with product and business objectives, measured against clear KPIs.
- Define and drive the technical roadmap for your team's domain — collaborating with product managers and peer engineering leaders to translate business goals into a prioritized, executable plan.
- Design and enforce engineering best practices across the team's codebase, including coding standards, testing strategies, observability, and clear Definition of Done criteria, raising the overall quality bar.
- Lead hiring and performance management for a team of software engineers, owning the full employee lifecycle from sourcing and onboarding through career development, performance reviews, and promotions.
- Coach and develop engineers at all levels — including senior engineers and emerging technical leads — through regular 1:1s, structured feedback, and deliberate career conversations that build the next generation of leaders.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, designers, and peer engineering managers to plan and deliver complex, multi-team initiatives, ensuring clear alignment on scope, dependencies, and timelines.
- Identify and remove delivery risks proactively — whether organizational, technical, or process-related — and drive improvements without waiting to be directed, keeping the team operating at high velocity.
- Champion a culture of quality and continuous improvement, embedding practices such as blameless post-mortems, structured incident response, and iterative process refinement into the team's day-to-day rhythm.
- Influence technical architecture across the team's domain by preparing and participating in design reviews, guiding architectural decisions, and ensuring systems are built for scalability, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
- Help build and shape the engineering presence, contributing to local talent acquisition, onboarding, and team culture as part of the organization's strategic expansion of its engineering hub.
Requirements
- 3+ years of experience leading engineering teams within the travel industry focused on supplier integrations (such as flights, hotels, or trains using Direct APIs, GDS, NDC, NDC[X]) or managing teams executing large-scale third-party content integrations.
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in an engineering leadership or management role directly managing software engineers, and a proven track record of leading productive teams and shipping high-quality software in a fast-paced environment; equivalent experience, training, or transferable skills considered.
- A proven track record of ownership and innovation within a data-driven, results-oriented environment, along with the ability to rapidly learn and master new business domains.
- A track record of steering organizational transformation, maximizing gains from agile methodologies, and fostering process optimization and innovation.
- Strong technical fundamentals in distributed systems, API design, and backend service architecture, with the ability to credibly guide architectural decisions and participate meaningfully in design reviews.
- Demonstrated experience owning the full people management lifecycle — hiring, onboarding, performance management, career development, and promotions — with a genuine commitment to developing engineering talent.
- Experience coaching and developing engineers at multiple levels, including senior engineers and emerging technical leads, through structured feedback, regular 1:1s, and deliberate career conversations.
- Solid understanding of agile delivery methodologies and the software development lifecycle, including CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and observability practices; comfortable driving process improvements within a sprint-based team.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to articulate a clear technical vision to both technical and non-technical audiences and collaborate effectively across product, design, and engineering functions.
- Professional proficiency in written and spoken English.
Benefits
- Work from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year
- Company-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth
- Company-paid subscription to HeadSpace
- Company-wide week off a year
- No meeting Fridays
- Paid parental leave
- Paid volunteer time
- Development Dollars
- Leadership development
- Access to thousands of on-demand e-learnings
Workplace
- This role will be required to work from our Berlin office at least 3 days per week.
- An awesome office in Friedrichshain, Berlin
Skills
- GitHub
- Jira
- CI/CD
- APIs
- Direct APIs
- GDS
- NDC
- NDC[X]
- Distributed Systems
- Backend Service Architecture
