Senior JAVA Software Engineer

Kayak•Cambridge, MA

8h•$125,000 - $165,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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/Concord, MA office at least 3 days per week.

Requirements

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 Haves

Experience with Spring, Git, Redis, Kafka, or similar technologies.
Experience working on search, booking, or high-throughput systems.

Responsibilities

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

Benefits

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
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)
parental leave benefits