Data Platform Manager

KAYAK is seeking a Data Platform Manager to lead the development and evolution of its shared data platform. This senior, hands-on leadership role will involve setting technical direction, making key architecture decisions, and directly addressing platform and reliability challenges. The successful candidate will manage a Berlin-based team, own the roadmap for KAYAK's shared data platform, and work closely with various departments to build a scalable and cost-effective platform for analytics, reporting, experimentation, and machine learning.

• Lead the development and evolution of KAYAK's shared data platform, making key architecture decisions and addressing platform and reliability challenges.
• Manage a Berlin-based team of data platform engineers, setting technical direction and ensuring high performance.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to build a scalable, trusted, and cost-effective platform for analytics, reporting, experimentation, and machine learning.
• You have led platform migrations or infrastructure modernization efforts with strong judgment on risk, reliability, cost, and business continuity
• You have hands-on experience with technologies relevant to KAYAK’s stack, such as Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, Trino, AWS, Kubernetes, Airflow, Python, SQL, and schema-based data contracts
• You have strong knowledge of large-scale data platform architecture, including streaming, batch, storage, orchestration, and distributed query engines
• You have 8+ years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, data architecture, or a related role
• You have meaningful people-management experience and a high technical bar
• You bring high ownership, sound judgment, systems thinking, and the ability to influence senior stakeholders
• You are comfortable working across Engineering, Data Science, Data Engineering, Operations, Security, and Product on technically complex topics
• You have led platforms with high-throughput event streams and large-scale analytical data