Staff Product Designer, Mobile focus

Job description

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 in our DNA 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. KAYAK is seeking a Staff Product Designer, Mobile to own the design direction across our apps and lead the craft of every designer who works on them. This is a senior individual contributor role with manager-level scope: you carry the design direction and UX/UI patterns across three teams (Apps Meta, Apps Retention, and Mobile Design Systems) while still designing and shipping yourself. You set the quality bar for all Apps design output, you hold it across teams, and you keep engineering pointed at the right work. You are the technical lead for apps design, accountable for the quality and velocity of what the apps designers produce, without managing them directly. This role is required to work from our Berlin office 3 days per week. In this role, you will: Own the design direction and the UX/UI pattern system across the apps surface. Navigation, mental models, and UI consistency cut across Apps Meta, Retention, and Design Systems at once, and you hold that cross-cutting direction so three teams ship one coherent experience rather than three versions of it. Set the quality standard for apps design and hold it as a discipline, not a project. Make the bar visible where teams miss it, and close gaps across teams that you did not personally create. You are accountable for the quality and velocity of all apps design output. Run planning and discovery for all three teams. Break multi-team, loosely defined problems into clear design direction the designers can run with. Partner with the Director of Product for Apps and the apps PMs on core initiatives, influencing roadmap and prioritization through design rationale. Lead native craft across iOS and A…