KAYAK

VP, Data

KAYAK

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Hybrid

Location: Berlin • 🇩🇪 Germany

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Job Level

Lead

Tech Stack

AWSAzureCloudETLGoogle Cloud Platform

About the role

  • 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.

Requirements

  • 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).
Benefits
  • 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

Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard skills
data strategydata platformdata ingestiondata processingdata storagedata catalogsAPIspredictive modelsETLdata modeling
Soft skills
leadershipmentoringcommunicationcollaborationinfluenceteam buildingorganizational skillsbusiness impactscaling teamsstakeholder management