Design Foundations & Operations Specialist

KAYAK, part of Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG), is a 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 at our core 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 looking for a Design Foundations & Operations Specialist to join our Design Language and Systems team. This role adds operational resilience to a team that builds the foundations every designer and engineer at KAYAK relies on: icons, illustrations, motion, tokens, component libraries, and the systems that hold them together across brands and platforms.

The scope isn't limited to design systems. This role is connective tissue between design systems, design language, UX research, operations, and individual product design pods across the company. You'll keep the team's work on track and visible, coordinate across disciplines, and make sure what gets designed actually gets built, shipped, and used.

This isn't a pure process role. You need to be fluent in design systems craft — not as the primary contributor, but because you need to understand what the team is building, where the goals are heading, and how to move things toward them. Someone who loses touch with the work can't coordinate it well.

If you think in systems, care about how teams operate at scale, and want to shape how a product design organization delivers, this is the job.

This role requires you to commute to our Berlin office 3 times a week.

In this role, you will:

• Coordinate design-to-engineering handoffs for foundations work. Ensure what gets designed moves into implementation, flag when things stall, and maintain a shared understanding of timelines and dependencies.

• Run and evolve contribution workflows — the processes that let product designers across the company adopt, use, and contribute to the design system. This includes onboarding, enablement sessions, office hours, and regular communication about what's changed and why.

• Maintain and publish quality metrics: component parity across platforms, adoption rates, deviation tracking. Make the team's measurement framework operational and current.

• Support the team's visual foundations work (icons, illustrations, assets) through governance, review, and hands-on contribution where needed. Ensure visual work meets the quality bar and integrates into existing libraries.

• Partner with design systems leads and design language leadership on translating brand direction into systematic, reusable guidance that product teams can apply.

• Support the definition and management of design tokens (color, typography, spacing, radius, motion) across brands and platforms.

• Work across product pods, brand partners, and engineering to align on how foundations work is prioritized, delivered, and adopted.

• Use AI tools to accelerate exploration, improve how assets move from design to implementation, and support the team's efforts to make the system ready for AI-assisted design workflows. We expect you to actively build and refine these workflows.
  

Please apply if you have:

• 5+ years of experience in a product design organization, with significant time spent in or closely alongside design systems work.

• Experience coordinating delivery across teams and stakeholders — tracking projects, managing handoffs, and keeping work moving without formal authority over everyone involved.

• Real design systems fluency. You understand how token architectures work, how component libraries are structured, how Figma libraries scale, and how design decisions map to code. Not conceptually. In practice.

• Experience running contribution or adoption workflows — getting other designers to use and contribute to shared systems, and iterating on the process based on what works.

• Strong Figma proficiency, including components, properties, variables, and library architecture.

• Visual judgment. You can review design work and articulate whether it meets the bar in terms of consistency, brand alignment, and system coherence.

• Comfort with measurement: tracking adoption, maintaining scorecards, and communicating progress to stakeholders.

• Comfort collaborating with engineers and front-end workflows like Storybook, GitHub, and component handoff tools.

• Hands-on experience using AI tools in your design workflow.

• A self-driven, autonomous approach. You pick up work and drive it forward without needing everything scoped in advance.

• A proactive and inquisitive mindset. You spot gaps, ask questions, and propose solutions rather than waiting for direction.
  

This role is not:

• A brand or campaign design role. The work is systematic and operational.

• A pure project management role. You need genuine design systems understanding, not just process skills.

• A people management role. You coordinate and influence, but don't manage direct reports.

• A UX, UI, or research role.

Benefits and Perks:

• 6 weeks of paid vacation

• 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

• 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

• Free lunch 2 days per week

• Pension plan contributions

• Public transportation subsidies

• Bike leasing program

• Monthly social events, massages, Thursday happy hours, sports teams

• An awesome office in Friedrichshain, Berlin

Inclusion

At KAYAK, 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.

Need any adjustments for the interview, application or on the job? No problem - just give us a heads-up. We’ve got you.

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