Engineering Manager – Flights Meta Backend

About the role

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Flights Meta Backend team at KAYAK. You will guide a group of backend engineers in building and operating the core services that power flight search across our meta‑search platforms.

Key responsibilities

• Lead, mentor and develop a team of backend engineers, providing technical guidance and career support.
• Define and own the technical roadmap, aligning it with product goals and the broader Meta Search strategy.
• Make architecture and engineering decisions for flight‑search APIs, services, scalability and maintainability.
• Collaborate with product, frontend, QA and design leaders to deliver complex cross‑functional features.
• Ensure clear sprint planning, definition of done and strong coordination between backend and frontend streams.
• Raise production readiness through testing, code coverage, monitoring, logging and performance validation.
• Support incident response and operational tooling for high‑severity issues.
• Foster an inclusive, collaborative culture and drive continuous improvement.
• Recruit, onboard and grow backend talent to meet roadmap needs.

Required profile

• Proven experience managing backend engineering teams delivering high‑impact, reliable services.
• Strong understanding of API design, service architecture and operational best practices.
• Excellent collaboration skills with product, frontend, QA and design partners.
• Track record of hiring and developing engineering talent.

Required skills

• Backend development and architecture.
• API design and service scalability.
• Testing, monitoring, logging and performance validation.

What we offer

• Opportunity to shape the core flight‑search experience for a global travel platform.
• Collaborative environment within a leading travel‑tech company.
• Hybrid work model with at‑least three days per week in our Kaunas office.