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, Cheap flights and Hotels Combined, 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  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  keep the team  work on track and visible, coordinate across disciplines, and make sure what gets designed actually gets built, shipped, and used.

This isn  a pure process role. You need to be fluent in design systems craft 0acknown, 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  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.

• 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 e6 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  changed and why.

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

• Support the team  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  efforts to make the system ready for AI-assisted design workflows. We expect you to actively build and refine these workflows.

• 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 a 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…