Senior JAVA Software Engineer

KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG), is a leading travel search engine. With billions of queries across our platforms, we help people find their perfect flight, stay, rental car and vacation package. We’re also transforming business travel with a new corporate travel solution, KAYAK for Business.

As an employee of KAYAK, you will be part of a travel company that operates a portfolio of global metasearch brands including momondo, Cheapflights and HotelsCombined, among others. From start-up to industry leader, innovation is in our DNA and every employee has an opportunity to make their mark. Our focus is on building the best travel search engine to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.

We’re hiring Java Backend Engineers to help improve and maintain KAYAK’s search and booking systems. If you care about travel and building helpful, reliable user experiences, we’d love to hear from you.

This role will be required to work from our Cambridge or Concord, MA office 3 days per week.

• Build and maintain backend features for the Stays team (search, booking, integrations).

• Improve performance, reliability, and user experience of existing systems.

• Integrate and maintain connections with internal and third-party APIs.

• Collaborate with frontend engineers, product, design, and QA to deliver features

• Strong Java development skills.

• Experience designing APIs and backend services.

• Experience building high-performance, scalable services.

• Familiarity with relational databases (e.g., MySQL) and web data formats/protocols (HTTP, XML, JSON).

• Practical experience with APIs (design, consumption, or integration).

• Clear communicator who works well on a team.

• Self-driven and able to move projects forward independently.

Nice to have

• Experience with Spring, Git, Redis, Kafka, or similar technologies.

• Experience working on search, booking, or high-throughput systems.

• Work from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year

• Flexible hours and ability to work from home 1 or 2 days per week

• Generous retirement plans

• Awesome health, dental and vision insurance plans with flexible spending accounts

• Focus on mental health and well-being:

  • Company-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth

  • Company-paid subscription to HeadSpace

  • Company-wide week off a year - the whole team fully recharges (and returns without a pile-up of work!)

  • No meeting Fridays

• Universal paid parental leave

• Generous paid vacation + time off for your birthday

• Paid volunteer time

• Focus on your career growth:

  • Development Dollars

  • Leadership development

  • Access to thousands of on-demand e-learnings

• Travel Discounts

• Employee Resource Groups

• Competitive retirement and health plans

• Free lunch 2 days per week

• Fun quarterly events such as boat trips, arcades, ski trips, Thursday happy hours, and more

There are a variety of factors that go into determining a salary range, including but not limited to external market benchmark data, geographic location, and years of experience sought/required. The range for this Massachusetts based role is $125,000-165,000, not inclusive of annual bonus and recurring RSU grants.

We offer a competitive base salary and benefits including: health benefits; flexible spending account; retirement benefits; life insurance; paid time off (including PTO, paid sick leave, medical leave, bereavement leave, floating holidays and paid holidays); and parental leave benefits.

At KAYAK, we want everyone to have the space to grow, share ideas and do great work. That’s why we’re focused on hiring the best talent from all walks of life and experiences, supporting them well and making sure no one feels like they have to fit a mold to belong here.

If you need accommodations during the application or interview process, or on the job, we’re here to support you. Please reach out to your recruiter to request any accommodations.

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