Senior Java Software Engineer, Platform Team

About the role

KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings, is a travel search engine and is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join its Backend Platform team in Kaunas. The team builds and maintains the core infrastructure, frameworks and runtime systems used by all engineering teams, helping improve how services are deployed, observed and scaled. The role requires working from the Kaunas office at least 3 days per week.

Key responsibilities

• Evolve shared backend platform capabilities, frameworks and runtime patterns adopted by engineering teams
• Shape backend platform direction around Java code structure, service architecture and standardisation of common runtime patterns such as Spring Boot-based services
• Improve deployment quality and developer velocity through better CI/CD workflows, pull-request quality gates and production-ready release practices
• Contribute to platform initiatives such as web gateways, multi-cluster deployment, faster pod startup, on-demand test environments, secure service-to-service communication and AI-driven observability
• Partner with product teams on their infrastructure needs, take part in design reviews and share knowledge with colleagues

Required profile

• 4+ years of backend or platform engineering experience, preferably in Java, with strong experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes or similar container orchestration tools and cloud-native infrastructure
• Experience improving CI/CD pipelines, deployment processes or test quality in production
• Strong observability and reliability mindset, with practical experience in monitoring and troubleshooting
• Good communication skills and professional proficiency in written and spoken English

Required skills

• Java and backend service architecture
• Kubernetes or similar container orchestration
• Nice to have: Spring / Spring Boot, multi-cluster deployment, zero-trust service communication, Kubernetes-hosted developer environments, ephemeral test environments

What we offer

• Base pay from 3,330 EUR to 6,660 EUR gross per month, plus a yearly bonus of about 10% of annual salary
• RSU package worth 20,000 USD gross, with possible yearly refreshes
• Remote work up to 20 days per year, flexible sick time and extra day off on your birthday
• Annual company-wide vacation week, paid therapy sessions, HeadSpace subscription and free lunch twice a week