Senior JAVA Software Engineer

About the role

KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG), is hiring Java Backend Engineers to improve and maintain KAYAK’s search and booking systems. This role will be based in Cambridge or Concord, MA, working 3 days per week.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain backend features for the Stays team (search, booking, integrations).
• Improve performance, reliability, and user experience of existing systems.
• Integrate and maintain connections with internal and third-party APIs.
• Collaborate with frontend engineers, product, design, and QA to deliver features.

Requirements

• Strong Java development skills.
• Experience designing APIs and backend services.
• Experience building high-performance, scalable services.
• Familiarity with relational databases (e.g., MySQL) and web data formats/protocols (HTTP, XML, JSON).
• Practical experience with APIs (design, consumption, or integration).
• Clear communicator who works well on a team.
• Self-driven and able to move projects forward independently.

Qualifications

• Nice to have: Experience with Spring, Git, Redis, Kafka, or similar technologies.
• Nice to have: Experience working on search, booking, or high-throughput systems.

Benefits and Perks

• Work from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year.
• Flexible hours and ability to work from home 1 or 2 days per week.
• Generous retirement plans.
• Awesome health, dental and vision insurance plans with flexible spending accounts.
• 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.
• Universal paid parental leave.
• Compensation: A variety of factors determine the salary range, including external market benchmark data, geographic location, and years of experience sought/required. For this Massachusetts based role, the range is $125,000-165,000, not inclusive of annual bonus and recurring RSU grants.
• Competitive base salary and benefits including: health benefits; flexible spending account; retirement benefits; life insurance; paid time off (including PTO, paid sick leave, medical leave, bereavement leave, floating holidays and paid holidays); and parental leave benefits.