Senior Backend Engineer - Lodging and Cars
Backend Engineer · Senior · Full Time · Remote
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Role
What you'll do.
Join Hopper's Lodging and Cars Supply team as a Senior Backend Engineer, where you'll architect and maintain scalable, high-throughput microservices handling billions of dollars in global travel transactions. This role demands deep expertise in JVM-based systems, distributed computing, and real-time booking fulfillment for a fast-growing travel fintech platform serving 120+ million users globally. You'll own end-to-end technical integrations with major lodging and car rental partners while optimizing resilient, low-latency services in a remote-first, high-impact environment.
Responsibilities
- End-to-End Technical Partner Integration: Execute comprehensive technical integrations with external lodging, car rental, and Global Distribution System (GDS) partners while navigating complex communication protocols, distributed data schemas, and real-time synchronization requirements. Lead the design and implementation of robust API integrations that handle high-volume booking requests and maintain data consistency across multiple systems.
- Scalable Service Development: Write clean, performant, production-grade code in Scala or other JVM languages (Java, Kotlin) to develop, maintain, and evolve mission-critical lodging and cars services. Focus on building services that maintain strict engineering standards while handling millions of concurrent transactions and ensuring 99.99% uptime for booking fulfillment.
- Complex Codebase Exploration and Troubleshooting: Independently explore and analyze complex, distributed codebases to diagnose and resolve production issues in real-time. Deep-dive into infrastructure bottlenecks, performance degradation, and system failures using observability tools and distributed tracing to implement surgical fixes that maintain system stability under high load.
- Cross-Functional Requirements Translation: Partner with Product Managers and Operations teams to decompose complex business requirements into technical specifications, architecture decisions, and implementation timelines. Translate commercial needs around booking reliability and partner onboarding into scalable technical solutions within microservices architecture.
- Full Lifecycle Feature Ownership: Take complete ownership of the development lifecycle for new product features spanning initial technical design, implementation, comprehensive testing, performance optimization, and safe production deployment. Drive features from conception through monitoring and optimization in production to ensure measurable business impact.
- High-Performance Service Architecture: Contribute to the design and implementation of highly resilient, low-latency services optimized for peak booking traffic and high concurrency. Architect services with built-in fault tolerance, graceful degradation, and real-time monitoring to ensure seamless booking experiences even under extreme load conditions.
- Code Quality and System Optimization: Participate in thorough code reviews with a focus on identifying optimization opportunities across scalability, performance, and system health. Mentor team members on distributed systems patterns, performance tuning, and operational excellence while maintaining a high bar for technical quality and architectural consistency.
- Production Monitoring and Observability: Implement comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting strategies for distributed services handling mission-critical bookings. Proactively identify performance anomalies, optimize query patterns, and ensure observability across the microservices ecosystem to enable rapid incident response and continuous improvement.
Qualifications
What we look for.
Technical
JVM Language Proficiency
Advanced proficiency in Scala with proven experience building production systems, or strong proficiency in Java/Kotlin with demonstrated ability to scale services to high throughput and low latency. Experience with functional programming paradigms and type-safe language features is essential for maintaining code quality in complex systems.
Microservices Architecture Expertise
Deep practical experience designing, implementing, and operating microservices-based systems at scale. Proven track record of decomposing monolithic systems, managing inter-service communication, handling distributed transactions, and maintaining consistency across service boundaries in production environments.
Distributed Systems and Communication Protocols
Hands-on experience with modern service-to-service communication patterns including gRPC for high-performance RPC, publish-subscribe messaging (Kafka, RabbitMQ), and RESTful APIs. Solid understanding of distributed system challenges including eventual consistency, idempotency, retry strategies, and circuit breakers.
Real-Time Data Processing
Experience building systems that handle high-volume, real-time data flows and transactions. Proficiency with event streaming, stream processing concepts, and implementation of systems that maintain accuracy and consistency while processing millions of events or transactions per day.
Database and Persistence Layer
Strong working knowledge of relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL systems, including schema design, query optimization, indexing strategies, and transaction handling. Experience with data migration, replication, and ensuring data integrity in distributed environments.
Production Reliability and Observability
Demonstrated expertise in building reliable, observable systems including experience with centralized logging (ELK stack, Datadog), distributed tracing (Jaeger, Zipkin), metrics collection (Prometheus), and alerting frameworks. Proven ability to investigate production issues using observability tools and implement fixes with minimal customer impact.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field
Formal education in computer science, software engineering, mathematics, or equivalent field providing strong foundational knowledge in algorithms, data structures, and systems design. Alternative: equivalent professional experience demonstrating mastery of computer science fundamentals.
Continued Learning in Distributed Systems
Demonstrated commitment to staying current with distributed systems architecture, cloud technologies, and modern backend engineering practices. This can be evidenced through technical publications, open-source contributions, conference presentations, or completion of specialized coursework.
Experience
Senior-Level Backend Engineering Experience
Minimum 5-7 years of professional backend software engineering experience, with at least 3+ years in senior-level roles owning technical design and architectural decisions. Demonstrated ability to make sound technical trade-offs, mentor junior engineers, and influence team technical direction.
Microservices and Distributed Systems Implementation
Proven track record of successfully implementing, deploying, and operating multiple microservices in production at scale. Evidence of owning complete feature lifecycle from technical design through production deployment, with demonstrated expertise in handling distributed system complexity and production troubleshooting.
High-Concurrency and High-Throughput Systems
Hands-on experience building and optimizing systems designed to handle millions of requests or transactions daily with strict latency requirements. Demonstrated ability to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, optimize resource utilization, and maintain service reliability under peak load conditions.
Cross-Functional Collaboration in Tech-Driven Organizations
Proven ability to work effectively with product managers, business stakeholders, and operations teams to translate requirements into technical solutions. Experience communicating complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and managing expectations around delivery timelines and technical constraints.
Skills
Required
Scala Programming
Expert-level proficiency in Scala with deep understanding of functional programming paradigms, type system, collections library, and Scala's concurrency model. Production experience building mission-critical services that handle high throughput and low latency requirements.
Java or Kotlin
Strong proficiency in Java (Spring, Jakarta EE frameworks) or Kotlin for building enterprise-grade backend services. Demonstrated ability to write efficient, maintainable code that scales to handle millions of operations daily while maintaining reliability and performance.
gRPC and Protocol Buffers
Hands-on experience designing and implementing gRPC services for high-performance inter-service communication. Proficiency with protocol buffers for efficient serialization and schema evolution in production systems handling real-time data exchange.
Pub/Sub Messaging Systems
Practical experience with publish-subscribe messaging patterns and technologies such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, or AWS SNS/SQS. Demonstrated understanding of message ordering, delivery guarantees, consumer groups, and building resilient event-driven architectures.
RESTful API Design
Expertise in designing and implementing clean, well-documented REST APIs following HTTP best practices. Experience with API versioning, error handling, rate limiting, and security considerations in production travel commerce systems.
SQL and Database Optimization
Strong SQL skills with proven ability to write efficient queries, design normalized schemas, and optimize database performance. Experience with query execution plans, indexing strategies, and performance tuning for high-concurrency applications.
Distributed Systems Architecture
Deep understanding of distributed systems principles including consensus algorithms, eventual consistency, distributed transactions, idempotency, and failure handling. Proven ability to architect systems that maintain correctness and reliability across service boundaries.
Production Debugging and Troubleshooting
Expert-level ability to diagnose and resolve complex production issues using logs, metrics, traces, and system observability tools. Demonstrated skill in identifying root causes of performance degradation or system failures in distributed environments and implementing reliable fixes.
Microservices Design Patterns
Practical expertise with microservices design patterns including circuit breakers, service discovery, distributed tracing, saga patterns for distributed transactions, and bulkhead isolation. Evidence of applying these patterns to build resilient, maintainable systems.
System Performance Optimization
Proven ability to identify performance bottlenecks, profile application code and infrastructure, and implement targeted optimizations. Experience with resource utilization analysis, caching strategies, batch processing optimization, and maintaining low-latency responses under high load.
Preferred
Travel or E-Commerce Industry Experience
Nice to havePrior experience in travel, hospitality, payments, or high-volume e-commerce platforms. Familiarity with booking systems, inventory management, pricing algorithms, or real-time commerce challenges provides valuable context for this role.
API Gateway and Service Mesh Technologies
Nice to haveExperience with modern infrastructure tools such as Kong, Envoy, Istio, or Linkerd for managing inter-service communication, routing, and resilience patterns. Knowledge of container orchestration and deployment of services in Kubernetes environments.
CI/CD Pipeline Design and Implementation
Nice to haveHands-on experience designing and implementing continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines using tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or CircleCI. Demonstrated focus on rapid, safe deployments with comprehensive automated testing.
Observability Stack Implementation
Nice to haveHands-on experience implementing comprehensive observability including centralized logging (ELK, Splunk, Datadog), distributed tracing (Jaeger, Zipkin), and metrics collection (Prometheus, Grafana). Ability to design dashboards and alerting strategies for production systems.
Cloud Platform Services
Nice to havePractical experience with AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Azure services for backend deployments. Familiarity with managed databases, containerization, serverless options, and cloud-native architecture patterns.
Financial or Payment Systems Experience
Nice to haveExperience building systems involving financial transactions, payments processing, or fintech applications. Understanding of transaction atomicity, settlement processes, and regulatory compliance requirements in financial systems.
Technical Leadership and Mentoring
Nice to haveDemonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives, mentor junior engineers, and influence architectural decisions within engineering teams. Evidence of improving team capabilities, conducting effective code reviews, and fostering a culture of technical excellence.
Data Integration and ETL Processes
Nice to haveExperience designing and implementing data integration workflows, ETL pipelines, or data synchronization between multiple systems. Knowledge of handling schema evolution, data reconciliation, and maintaining data consistency across heterogeneous systems.
Tech stack
Languages
Frameworks
Databases
Tools
Other
Compensation
Pay and benefits.
Base·USD 160,000 – 240,000
Full posting
Original listing.
About the Role
Join the Lodging and Cars Supply team at the heart of our lodging and cars business unit, where you will be instrumental in scaling a global hotel and cars ecosystem that handles high-volume, real-time transactions.
As a senior-level individual contributor, you will navigate a complex microservices environment to deliver reliable booking fulfillment, integrate new lodging and cars partners into our core stack, and optimize system monitoring. This role is designed for a self-directed engineer who excels at system exploration and immediate technical execution within an established, high-growth travel environment.
What would your day-to-day look like
Execute end-to-end technical integrations with external lodgings, cars and GDS partners while navigating complex communication protocols and distributed data schemas.
Write clean, performant code in Scala or other JVM languages to maintain, evolve, and uphold rigorous engineering standards for mission-critical lodging services.
Explore and troubleshoot existing complex codebases to deep-dive into infrastructure and resolve production issues in a distributed system environment.
Partner with Product Managers and Operations to decompose business requirements into technical tasks and estimate delivery timelines.
Take full ownership of the development lifecycle for new product features, from initial technical implementation and testing to production deployment.
Contribute to the design of highly resilient, low-latency services to ensure a seamless booking experience for customers under high load.
Participate in thorough code reviews and identify opportunities to optimize scalability, performance, and system health.
An ideal candidate has
Strong proficiency in Scala or other JVM languages, such as Java or Kotlin, with a focus on building scalable, high-throughput services.
A proven track record of owning the technical implementation, testing, and deployment of features within a microservices architecture.
Practical experience with distributed systems and service communication methods including gRPC, Pub/Sub, and REST.
The ability to onboard quickly and handle technical ambiguity by independently exploring and executing technical plans within existing infrastructure.
Excellent communication skills and a "bias for action" to effectively collaborate with cross-functional squads in a remote-first environment.
A professional curiosity for the travel tech industry and a commercial mindset focused on delivering reliable booking fulfillment.
Perks and Benefits of working with us
Well-funded and proven startup with large ambitions, competitive salary and the upsides of pre-IPO equity packages.
Unlimited PTO.
Carrot Cash travel stipend.
Access to co-working space on demand through FlexDesk AND Work-from-home stipend.
Please ask us about our very generous parental leave, much above industry standards!.
Entrepreneurial culture where pushing limits and taking risks is everyday business.
Open communication with management and company leadership.
Small, dynamic teams = massive impact.
100% employer paid Medical, Dental and Vision coverage for employees.
Access to Disability & Life insurance.
Health Reimbursement Account (HRA).
DCA/ FSA and access to 401k plan.
More about Hopper
At Hopper, we are on a mission to become the leading travel platform globally – powering Hopper’s mobile app, website and our B2B business, HTS (Hopper Technology Solutions). By leveraging massive amounts of data and advanced machine learning algorithms, Hopper combines its world-class travel agency offering with proprietary fintech products to bring transparency, flexibility and savings to travelers globally. We have developed several unique fintech solutions that address everything from pricing volatility to trip disruptions – helping people travel better and save more on their trips.
The Hopper platform serves hundreds of millions of travelers globally and continues to capture market share around the world. he Hopper app has been downloaded over 120 million times and has become largely popular among younger travelers – with 70% of its users being Gen Z and millennials.
While everyone knows us as the Gen Z and Millennial travel app, Hopper has evolved to become much more than that. In recent years, we’ve grown into a travel fintech provider, commerce platform, and global travel agency that powers some of the world’s largest brands.
Through HTS, our B2B division, the company supercharges its partners’ direct channels by integrating our fintech products on their sites or powering end-to-end travel portals. Today, our partners include leading travel brands like Capital One, Nubank, Air Canada, and many more.
Here are just a few stats that demonstrate the company’s recent growth:
Billions of dollars worth of travel and travel fintech are sold through Hopper and HTS’ channels every year.
Our fintech products – including Cancel for Any Reason and Flight Disruption Assistance – have exceptionally strong CSAT because the terms are always clear, and customers receive instant, no-questions-asked resolutions.
Almost 30% of our app customers purchase at least one fintech product when making a booking; and consumers are 1.6x more likely to repurchase if they add fintech to their booking vs if they booked just travel.
Given the success of its fintech products, Hopper launched a B2B initiative, HTS (Hopper Technology Solutions), which represents more than 75% of the business.
Through HTS, any travel provider (airlines, hotels, banks, travel agencies, etc.) can integrate and seamlessly distribute Hopper’s fintech or travel inventory on their direct channels. As its first HTS partnership, the company partnered with Capital One to co-develop Capital One Travel, a new travel portal designed specifically for cardholders. Other HTS partners include Air Canada, Uber, CommBank, Nubank, Flair Airlines and many more.
Hopper has been named the #1 most innovative company in travel by Fast Company Hopper has been downloaded over 120 million times and continues to have millions of new installs each month. Hopper is now the #3 largest online travel agencies in North America and 70% of our app customers are Gen-Z and millennials travelers.
Hopper has raised over $750 million USD of private capital and is backed by some of the largest institutional investors and banks in the world. HTS is primed to continue its growth as the leading travel ecommerce provider in a $1 trillion online shopping category. The Hopper app and website will also continue to be the preferred travel provider for Gen Z and Millennials.
Come take off with us!
At Hopper, we leverage AI-driven tools to assist our team in efficiently reviewing applications. These tools help us assess qualifications fairly and objectively. By submitting your application, you acknowledge the use of these automated screening technologies.
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