Staff Data Engineer (Data Platform)

Location: Berlin office, hybrid; required to work from the Berlin office 3 days per week

Salary: Not specified

Company

hirify.global is a travel search engine and part of Booking Holdings, operating global metasearch brands and building travel search and corporate travel products with AI and data.

What you will do

• Design and evolve the shared Data Platform, including near-real-time streaming, lakehouse storage, schema management, semantic layers, and distributed query infrastructure.
• Lead platform initiatives from problem framing and architecture design through implementation, rollout, and operational handoff.
• Define standards and reusable patterns for data contracts, schema evolution, ingestion, compaction, retention, governance, observability, and production readiness.
• Build monitoring for pipelines, consumer lag, data quality, alerting, and platform reliability.
• Drive metadata and semantic-layer strategy for trusted self-service analytics and AI-driven data access.
• Collaborate with Operations, Security, Engineering, Data Engineering, and Product while mentoring engineers through reviews, pairing, and technical guidance.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional data engineering experience, including substantial senior- or staff-level work with domain-wide technical scope.
• Experience designing and operating lakehouse architectures at scale using open table formats such as Apache Iceberg, Parquet, and cloud object storage.
• Production experience building streaming pipelines with event-driven ingestion, exactly-once semantics, consumer lag management, checkpointing, recovery, and failure handling.
• Hands-on experience with data contracts, schema governance, metadata, or semantic-layer systems.
• Strong Python skills and experience writing maintainable, testable production code.
• Experience operating data workloads on Kubernetes and influencing multiple teams through architectural communication, mentoring, and technical standards.

Nice to have

• Experience with distributed query engines such as Trino and workflow orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow.
• Experience with AWS or another public cloud provider.
• Experience with CI/CD and deployment automation, such as GitHub Actions.
• Working knowledge of Java or another JVM-based language.

Culture & Benefits

• Work from almost anywhere for up to 20 days per year.
• Six weeks of paid vacation, a birthday day off, paid parental leave, paid volunteer time, and pension contributions.
• Company-paid therapy sessions, Headspace subscription, a company-wide week off, and no-meeting Fridays.
• Development dollars, leadership development, and access to on-demand e-learning.
• Travel discounts, free lunch two days per week, public transportation subsidies, bike leasing, employee resource groups, and social activities.