VP, Data

KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG), is the world's 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 at our core 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 VP, Data will own KAYAK’s data strategy and platform, leading Data Engineering and Data Science to deliver reliable, scalable, and impactful data products. This leader will define the data roadmap, ensure governance and quality, enable analytics and ML at scale, and partner closely with DevOps, Engineering, Product, and Security teams to operationalize data solutions (without directly managing DevOps teams).

This role will be required to work from our Berlin, Germany office at least 3 days per week. We are open to considering relocation for this position.

In this role, you will:

• Define and drive the company’s data strategy and roadmap to enable analytics, experimentation, and machine learning aligned to business goals.

• Lead design, development, and evolution of the data platform (ingestion, processing, storage, catalogs, APIs) to ensure scalability, reliability, and performance.

• Oversee data science teams to deliver predictive models, experimentation frameworks, and ML systems that create measurable business impact.

• Establish and enforce data governance, metadata management, lineage, and data quality standards to ensure trust and compliance.

• Partner closely with DevOps, Cloud/Infrastructure, Engineering, Product, and Security to productionize data products, define SLAs, and align on deployment and monitoring practices—collaborating with but not directly managing DevOps teams.

• Recruit, mentor, and grow high-performing data engineering and data science teams; define org structure, career paths, and performance metrics.

• Define KPIs for data platform adoption, model performance, data quality, and time-to-insight; use outcomes to prioritize investments.

• Guide architecture choices (cloud-native data stacks, streaming vs batch, data warehouse vs data lakehouse), review critical designs, and promote best practices in engineering and ML ops.

Please apply if you have:

• Experience: 10+ years building data platforms and analytics/ML organizations, with at least 5 years in senior leadership.

• Technical depth: Strong background in modern data engineering and data science practices (ETL/ELT, data modeling, warehousing/lakehouse, streaming, feature stores, ML lifecycle). Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP) and CI/CD for data/ML workflows.

• Leadership: Proven track record hiring, scaling, and developing technical teams and partnering across product and engineering organizations.

• Governance & security: Experience implementing data governance, privacy controls, access management, and compliance processes.

• Communication & business impact: Able to translate technical tradeoffs into business value and influence senior stakeholders.

• Education: Degree in CS, engineering, statistics, or related field (or equivalent experience).

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience with large-scale travel or consumer product data.

• Familiarity with MLOps and feature-store implementations.

• Prior experience collaborating with DevOps and cloud infrastructure teams to productionize data/ML workloads.

Benefits and Perks:

• Work from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year

• Focus on mental health and well-being:

  • Company-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth

  • Company-paid subscription to HeadSpace

  • Company-wide week off a year - the whole team fully recharges (and returns without a pile-up of work!)

• No meeting Fridays

• Paid parental leave

• Generous paid vacation + time off for your birthday

• Paid volunteer time

• Focus on your career growth:

  • Development Dollars

  • Leadership development

  • Access to thousands of on-demand e-learnings

• Travel Discounts

• Employee Resource Groups

• 6 weeks paid vacation

• Free lunch 2 days per week

• Pension plan contributions

• Public transportation subsidies

• Bike leasing program

• Monthly social events, Thursday happy hours, sports teams

• An awesome office in Friedrichshain, Berlin

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.

If you need accommodations during the application or interview process, or on the job, we’re here to support you. Please reach out to your recruiter to request any accommodations.

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