VP, Data

KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG), is the world's 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 at our core 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.

The VP, Data will own KAYAK’s data strategy and platform, leading Data Engineering and Data Science to deliver reliable, scalable, and impactful data products. This leader will define the data roadmap, ensure governance and quality, enable analytics and ML at scale, and partner closely with DevOps, Engineering, Product, and Security teams to operationalize data solutions (without directly managing DevOps teams).

This role will be required to work from our Concord, MA office at least 3 days per week. We are open to considering relocation within the US for this position.

In this role, you will:

• Define and drive the company’s data strategy and roadmap to enable analytics, experimentation, and machine learning aligned to business goals.

• Lead design, development, and evolution of the data platform (ingestion, processing, storage, catalogs, APIs) to ensure scalability, reliability, and performance.

• Oversee data science teams to deliver predictive models, experimentation frameworks, and ML systems that create measurable business impact.

• Establish and enforce data governance, metadata management, lineage, and data quality standards to ensure trust and compliance.

• Partner closely with DevOps, Cloud/Infrastructure, Engineering, Product, and Security to productionize data products, define SLAs, and align on deployment and monitoring practices—collaborating with but not directly managing DevOps teams.

• Recruit, mentor, and grow high-performing data engineering and data science teams; define org structure, career paths, and performance metrics.

• Define KPIs for data platform adoption, model performance, data quality, and time-to-insight; use outcomes to prioritize investments.

• Guide architecture choices (cloud-native data stacks, streaming vs batch, data warehouse vs data lakehouse), review critical designs, and promote best practices in engineering and ML ops.

Please apply if you have:

• Experience: 10+ years building data platforms and analytics/ML organizations, with at least 5 years in senior leadership.

• Technical depth: Strong background in modern data engineering and data science practices (ETL/ELT, data modeling, warehousing/lakehouse, streaming, feature stores, ML lifecycle). Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP) and CI/CD for data/ML workflows.

• Leadership: Proven track record hiring, scaling, and developing technical teams and partnering across product and engineering organizations.

• Governance & security: Experience implementing data governance, privacy controls, access management, and compliance processes.

• Communication & business impact: Able to translate technical tradeoffs into business value and influence senior stakeholders.

• Education: Degree in CS, engineering, statistics, or related field (or equivalent experience).

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience with large-scale travel or consumer product data.

• Familiarity with MLOps and feature-store implementations.

• Prior experience collaborating with DevOps and cloud infrastructure teams to productionize data/ML workloads.

• 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 $220,000 - 260,000.00.

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. This role is eligible to be considered for an annual bonus and equity grant.

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.

Note for MA applicants: It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

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