Senior JAVA Software Engineer

About the role

KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG), is a leading travel search engine. We operate a portfolio of global metasearch brands including momondo, Cheapflights and HotelsCombined, among others. This role will be required to work from our Cambridge or Concord, MA office 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. The range for this Massachusetts based role 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.

Inclusion

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.