Manager, Data Platform
RemoteBerlin, State of Berlin, Germany or Germany
Job Summary
Own the roadmap for KAYAK's shared data platform and lead a high-performing Berlin-based team of data platform engineers. Evolve the platform architecture across ingestion, storage, orchestration, runtime, and lakehouse foundations while building core capabilities such as schema registry, data contracts, observability, metadata, and semantic layer implementation. Enforce data retention policies and platform controls, improve reliability through monitoring, alerting, and incident response tooling, and drive modernization of legacy systems. Define clear ownership boundaries so the platform team owns shared infrastructure and raw data quality, while downstream teams own business logic. This senior, hands-on leadership role requires working from the Berlin office three days per week.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, data architecture, or a related role
- meaningful people-management experience
- high technical bar
- strong knowledge of large-scale data platform architecture, including streaming, batch, storage, orchestration, and distributed query engines
- 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
- led platforms with high-throughput event streams and large-scale analytical data
- led platform migrations or infrastructure modernization efforts with strong judgment on risk, reliability, cost, and business continuity
- comfortable working across Engineering, Data Science, Data Engineering, Operations, Security, and Product on technically complex topics
- high ownership
- sound judgment
- systems thinking
- the ability to influence senior stakeholders
- This role is required to work from our Berlin office 3 days per week
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