Senior Software Engineer, Meta AI

About the role

KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings, is a travel search engine and is looking for a strong Java Senior Software Engineer to implement new features and maintain its AI. The role sits in a high-powered team behind the travel-search and trip-planning experience, and requires commuting to the Kaunas office three times a week.

Key responsibilities

• Design, implement and maintain reliable production software for KAYAK's travel-search and trip-planning experiences.
• Build and evolve APIs and services supporting AI-assisted search, conversational travel planning, itineraries and related user experiences.
• Investigate technical problems, assess trade-offs and choose practical solutions that improve reliability, performance and maintainability.
• Write automated tests and contribute to unit, integration and end-to-end testing.
• Participate in code reviews and technical discussions, and work with engineers, product managers and designers on requirements.
• Contribute to features such as ASK AI, smart filters, AI-generated hotel review summaries and Explore.
• Learn unfamiliar systems, document and share knowledge, and monitor production behavior through debugging, observability and root-cause analysis.
• Help evolve development tools, engineering processes and delivery practices.

Required profile

• Experience building and maintaining production software.
• Proficiency in Java or another relevant programming language.
• Ability to explain technical decisions clearly in writing and conversation, and to take ownership of work.
• Good communication skills in English; equivalent practical experience is welcome in place of a specific degree.

Required skills

• Familiarity with APIs, data structures and software-design principles.
• Experience testing software and investigating defects or production issues.
• Nice to have: distributed systems, search, personalization or high-volume consumer products; AI, machine learning or large language models; relational databases; web, mobile or travel products; accessibility, reliability or usability improvements; Java and Spring; cloud services, CI/CD pipelines and automated testing frameworks.

What we offer

• Base pay from 3,330 EUR up to 6,660 EUR gross monthly, plus a yearly bonus of about 10% of annual salary.
• RSU package worth 20,000 USD gross, with possible yearly refreshes.
• Work from almost anywhere for up to 20 days per year, and no meeting Fridays.
• Health insurance, flexible sick time, additional sick leave support, a birthday day off, a company-wide winter holiday week, parental leave support and free lunch twice a week.
• Career growth funds, on-demand e-learning, yoga twice a week, paid volunteering time, therapy sessions and HeadSpace subscription.