Geared toward candidates comfortable with maintaining platform reliability and incident response, who thrive in a collaborative environment with a global travel domain focus and a full-time on-site work arrangement.
Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.
Original posting from KAYAK via Ashby
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.
The Operations team keeps our platform reliable, available, and ready for change — and this role sits at the heart of that mission. As an Operations Engineer, you will work alongside a collaborative, cross-functional team to maintain the infrastructure and production systems that millions of travelers depend on every day. You will contribute to incident response, platform reliability, and the continuous improvement of the tools and processes that keep our services running safely at scale. This is a role for someone who takes pride in operational craft, enjoys solving real problems with real impact, and wants to grow within a team that values learning, transparency, and shared ownership.
IN THIS ROLE YOU WILL:
- Maintain infrastructure and platform reliability across production and non-production environments, including compute, storage, networking, and container orchestration systems.
- Participate in on-call rotations, responding to and triaging incidents, following established runbook procedures, and escalating appropriately; on-call is a real part of this role and we work to keep rotations sustainable and well-distributed.
- Contribute to post-incident reviews, identifying patterns in recurring issues and raising them for longer-term resolution.
- Apply configuration management and infrastructure-as-code methods (such as Puppet, Terraform, and Ansible) to keep environments consistent, recoverable, and auditable.
- Support the lifecycle of platform services — including provisioning, patching, upgrades, and decommissioning — across hypervisor, Kubernetes, and virtual machine environments.
- Monitor system health using observability tooling, investigate alerts, and contribute to improving alert quality and reducing unnecessary noise.
- Collaborate with engineering, security, database, and release engineering teams to support production changes, coordinate maintenance windows, and resolve cross-team issues.
- Write and maintain clear operational documentation — runbooks, how-to guides, and post-incident summaries — so knowledge is shared and accessible to the whole team.
- Contribute to capacity and performance work, helping ensure systems are sized to handle peak load safely.
- Explore and responsibly apply AI-assisted tooling where it reduces toil, improves observability, or accelerates operational workflows.
PLEASE APPLY IF YOU HAVE:
- 3 or more years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or operations engineering, or equivalent practical experience in a related technical role.
- Hands-on experience operating Linux-based systems in a production environment, including familiarity with networking fundamentals (DNS, load balancing, firewalls) and compute/storage concepts.
- Working knowledge of at least one configuration management or infrastructure-as-code tool — such as Puppet, Terraform, or Ansible — and comfort applying it to real environments.
- Experience with container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes or equivalent), including deploying, monitoring, and troubleshooting containerized workloads.
- Familiarity with observability tooling — such as Prometheus, Grafana, or equivalent — including reading dashboards, investigating alerts, and contributing to monitoring improvements.
- Experience participating in on-call rotations or incident response, with the ability to triage issues methodically, communicate status clearly, and follow documented procedures.
- Clear written and verbal communication in English, with the ability to write useful technical documentation and collaborate across distributed teams.
- A collaborative, team-first approach: you give and receive feedback constructively, bring evidence and reasoning to technical discussions, and support teammates during incidents and reviews.
Equivalent experience, training, or transferable skills are considered. A degree in a technical field is welcome but not required.
COMPENSATION
Operations Engineer salary consists of three elements:
Base pay: may start from 4400 EUR gross.
Salary range provided is not final and will be discussed during the process based on your skills and experience.
In addition:
- Significant yearly bonuses, approx 10 percent of annual salary
- Booking Holdings RSU (Restricted Stock Units) package, worth 20000 USD gross, with possibility to receive yearly refreshes
Offers of employment are conditioned upon satisfactory completion of all required pre-employment screenings, including a background check, in accordance with applicable law.
BENEFITS AND PERKS
- Work from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year
- Funds for your career growth
- Access to thousands of on-demand e-learnings
- Generous additional Health Insurance
- Flexible sick time off
- Additional financial support for your sick leave
- Additional day off on your birthday
- Company-wide vacation week once a year (winter holidays)
- Additional financial support during parental leave
- Free lunch twice a week and daily snacks at the office
- Free yoga twice a week
- Paid volunteering time
- No meeting Fridays
- Office and team events such as summer camp, KAYAK birthday, winter party and more!
- Company-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth
- Company-paid subscription to HeadSpace
- Internal Communities
INCLUSION
At KAYAK, we want everyone to have the space to grow, share ideas and do great work. That's why we're focused on hiring the best talent from all walks of life and experiences, supporting them well and making sure no one feels like they have to fit a mold to belong here.
Need any adjustments for the interview, application or on the job? No problem – just give us a heads-up. We've got you.
#LI-MP1
Source: KAYAK careers (Ashby)