Staff Data Platform Engineer (m/f/d)

• Design and evolve the architecture of KAYAK’s shared Data Platform, including near-real-time streaming, lakehouse storage, schema management, semantic layer, and distributed query infrastructure. Make thoughtful trade-offs between latency, correctness, cost, and long-term maintainability.
• Deliver high-impact platform initiatives end-to-end — from problem framing and architecture design through implementation, rollout, and operational handoff.
• Define and promote technical standards for data contracts, schema evolution, ingestion patterns, and production readiness across platform and domain teams.
• Lead high-impact platform initiatives from problem framing and architecture design through implementation, rollout, and operational handoff.
• Develop reusable patterns and reference architectures for streaming ingestion, compaction, retention, schema governance, observability, and other recurring data engineering challenges.
• Establish reliable observability across the platform, including pipeline monitoring, consumer lag tracking, data quality checks, and alerting.
• Collaborate closely with Operations, Security, Engineering, Data Engineering, and Data Science, and Analytics to evolve the platform, build cross-functional support, and ensure the platform meets the needs of its users.
• Drive the semantic layer and metadata strategy that supports consistent and trusted self-service analytics and AI-driven data access.
• Evaluate technologies and approaches across streaming, storage, query, orchestration, and cloud infrastructure, balancing scalability, operational complexity, cost, and maintainability.
• Coach and mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, and reusable technical guidance.
• Own the most complex architectural and operational challenges on the data platform, including failure recovery, schema drift, partition management, and performance degradation.

• 7+ years of professional experience in data engineering, with meaningful time spent at a senior or staff level with domain-wide technical scope.
• Experience designing and operating lakehouse architectures at scale — including open table formats (e.g., Apache Iceberg), columnar storage (Parquet) and cloud object storage (e.g. S3)
• Experience building and operating streaming data pipelines — including event-driven ingestion, exactly-once delivery semantics, consumer lag management, checkpoint and recovery strategies, and failure handling in production environments.
• Hands-on experience with data contracts, data governance, metadata, or semantic-layer systems.
• Strong Python skills and a track record of writing maintainable, testable production code.
• Experience deploying and operating data workloads on Kubernetes — including managing containerized infrastructure, resource tuning and health checks.
• Proven ability to influence multiple teams, communicate architectural trade-offs, and drive adoption.
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising technical standards through code reviews, documentation, and reusable patterns.
• Comfort taking ownership of broad, ambiguous problem spaces.

To stand out:

• Distributed query engines such as Trino.
• Experience with Kafka, Flink, or comparable streaming technologies.
• Workflow orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow.
• Experience with AWS or an equivalent public cloud provider.
• CI/CD and deployment automation (e.g., GitHub Actions).
• Working knowledge of Java or another JVM-based language, given the JVM-based nature of several frameworks in this domain.

Benefits and Perks

• This role will be required to work from our Berlin office 3 days per week.
• Work from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year
• 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
• Paid parental leave
• 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
• 6 weeks paid vacation + a day off for your birthday
• Free lunch 2 days per week
• Pension plan contributions
• Public transportation subsidies
• Bike leasing program
• Monthly social events, Thursday happy hours, sports teams
• An awesome office in Friedrichshain, Berlin