Hopper

Staff Backend Software Engineer

Hopper3 days ago
Location

Uruguay - Remote

Workplace

Remote

Type

Full Time

Salary

USD 180,000 – 250,000

Level

Staff

Role

Backend Engineer

Posted

Jun 30, 2026

Full TimeRemoteStaff

The role

Summary

Join Hopper as a Staff Backend Software Engineer to architect scalable travel commerce systems that power 410M cardholders across global banking partnerships. You'll lead the evolution of Hopper Technology Solutions (HTS), a multi-tenant travel engine serving major brands including Capital One and Air Canada, leveraging AI-assisted development methodologies to accelerate feature delivery at unprecedented scale. This contractor role requires mastery of distributed systems in Scala and GCP, combined with the judgment to orchestrate AI agents and autonomous workflows while maintaining the architectural integrity that compounds value across Hopper's $1 trillion market opportunity.

What you'll do

Architect Scalable Backend Systems: Design and implement distributed system solutions in Scala that serve as foundational patterns enabling rapid partner experience launches. Drive architectural decisions that balance technical excellence with customer experience, ensuring backend infrastructure supports multi-tenant configurations across 410M+ cardholders while maintaining sub-millisecond latency requirements for travel commerce transactions.
Lead AI-Assisted Development Initiatives: Orchestrate AI agents and automated workflows to accelerate feature development, development lifecycle, and system maintenance. Establish guardrails, feedback loops, and validation mechanisms that keep AI-assisted development productive and reliable. Exercise judgment to determine when to delegate to AI automation versus manual intervention, optimizing delivery velocity without sacrificing quality.
Own Features End-to-End: Deliver complete features from backend systems through partner-facing surfaces, with primary focus on backend development while leveraging AI tooling to operate across the full stack when required. Coordinate between backend infrastructure, frontend components, and integration points to ship cohesive experiences that enhance partner competitiveness and drive incremental cardholder spend.
Drive Asynchronous Decision-Making: Produce thoughtful technical specifications and architectural documentation that enables consensus-building across distributed teams in a low-process, trust-based environment. Articulate not just how problems will be solved, but why specific approaches were selected and what technical tradeoffs are being accepted, ensuring architectural vision aligns with business objectives.
Collaborate on Product Direction: Work directly with product managers and business partners to translate business requirements into technical roadmap priorities. Contribute technical expertise to partner strategy discussions, shaping how the HTS platform evolves to maintain competitive advantage and capture additional share within the travel commerce ecosystem.
Improve Codebase Efficiency: Identify and execute strategic improvements to the codebase that enhance both human and AI agent productivity. Establish patterns and abstractions that reduce cognitive load, accelerate onboarding, and enable faster safe shipping, particularly focusing on areas where AI-assisted development can compound efficiency gains.
Mentor and Drive Feedback Culture: Collaborate with diverse engineering teams, providing and receiving constructive feedback to drive collective growth. Share architectural patterns and best practices that elevate engineering standards across the organization, particularly around distributed systems design and AI-assisted development methodologies.

What we look for

Technical

Distributed Systems DesignDemonstrated expertise designing and implementing distributed architectures at scale, with particular strength in handling multi-tenant configurations, eventual consistency patterns, and high-availability systems serving hundreds of millions of users. Experience designing systems that maintain data integrity and performance across geographic regions.
Scala and JVM EcosystemMastery-level experience with Scala and the broader JVM ecosystem, including functional programming paradigms, type system sophistication, and performance optimization. Comfort navigating immutable data structures, monadic patterns, and async frameworks that enable efficient concurrent systems. Understanding of Scala's strengths for building maintainable, type-safe distributed applications.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)Production experience deploying and optimizing systems on GCP infrastructure, including services like Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, and Cloud Storage. Understanding of GCP architectural patterns, cost optimization strategies, and security best practices for enterprise-scale travel commerce platforms.
AI Agents and Autonomous WorkflowsPractical experience orchestrating LLM-based agents and building feedback loops that enable reliable autonomous development and system maintenance. Demonstrated understanding of LLM strengths, weaknesses, and hallucination patterns. Ability to design guardrails, validation mechanisms, and human-in-the-loop processes that maintain system reliability while leveraging AI acceleration.
API Design and Integration ArchitectureExperience designing robust RESTful or gRPC APIs that enable seamless integration across partner systems, payment processors, and airline/hotel inventory providers. Understanding of API versioning, backwards compatibility, rate limiting, and documentation practices that facilitate partner adoption and minimize integration friction.
Database Design and OptimizationExpertise in database architecture decisions including relational database optimization, query performance tuning, indexing strategies, and data modeling for transactional systems handling millions of concurrent travel bookings. Experience with NoSQL databases for specific use cases and understanding of when to apply different persistence approaches.
Product-Oriented DevelopmentAbility to anchor architectural decisions in customer experience and business impact rather than technical elegance alone. Track record of shipping features that directly improve partner competitiveness, drive user adoption, or generate incremental revenue. Comfort translating business requirements into technical implementation strategies.

Education

Computer Science or Related DegreeBachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or equivalent practical engineering experience. Formal education provides foundation in algorithms, data structures, and distributed systems theory that accelerate progression to staff-level roles.
Advanced Distributed Systems KnowledgeStrong foundational knowledge of distributed systems principles including consensus algorithms, replication strategies, eventual consistency, and failure recovery. This knowledge should be demonstrated through production experience, published technical writing, or open-source contributions rather than academic study alone.

Experience

Staff or Principal Level Backend EngineeringMinimum 8-10 years of professional backend software engineering experience, with at least 3+ years in staff-level or equivalent IC leadership roles. Demonstrated ability to own major architectural initiatives, mentor junior engineers, and drive technical decisions that compound across large systems. Track record of delivering complex features that achieve measurable business impact.
Scale ExperienceProduction experience building systems serving hundreds of millions of users or handling billions of transactions. Understanding of performance optimization, observability, and reliability engineering practices required at large scale. Experience navigating the complexity of monolithic codebases transitioning to service-oriented architectures or microservices.
Fintech or Travel Commerce ExperiencePrior experience in fintech or travel commerce environments is highly valuable. Understanding of payment processing workflows, PCI compliance, inventory management across multiple suppliers, pricing optimization algorithms, or disruption management systems. Familiarity with regulatory requirements and the business model complexity of travel transaction platforms.
Autonomous Development and AI ToolingHands-on experience integrating AI-assisted development tools into engineering workflows and evaluating LLM-based coding assistants. Track record of shipping features faster by effectively leveraging AI agents, automated testing generation, and code generation tools while maintaining quality standards and architectural consistency.
Multi-Tenant Platform DevelopmentExperience building multi-tenant systems that serve multiple customers or business partners with isolation guarantees, customizable configurations, and scalable infrastructure. Understanding of tenant data segregation, tenant-aware querying, and the architectural patterns that enable efficient white-label or partner platform delivery.

Skills

Required skills

ScalaExpert-level proficiency with Scala programming language, including functional programming patterns, type system leverage, and asynchronous frameworks like Akka or ZIO. Ability to write performant, maintainable Scala code that scales to handle millions of requests.
Distributed Systems ArchitectureDeep expertise designing distributed systems with strong understanding of consistency models, fault tolerance, monitoring, and performance optimization. Ability to architect systems that maintain correctness under Byzantine failure scenarios and operate reliably across multiple data centers.
Backend System DesignProven ability to design backend systems supporting high-traffic production environments, including API design, database architecture, caching strategies, and asynchronous processing patterns. Experience optimizing for latency, throughput, and resource efficiency.
Google Cloud PlatformProduction-grade experience deploying and operating systems on GCP, with proficiency in services like Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, and monitoring/observability tools. Understanding of GCP cost optimization and architectural best practices.
LLM and AI Agent IntegrationPractical experience working with Large Language Models and AI agents in production contexts, including prompt engineering, output validation, and building feedback loops that improve model quality over time. Understanding of LLM limitations and when not to use AI.
Product ThinkingStrong ability to connect technical architecture decisions to customer experience and business outcomes. Comfort making tradeoff decisions that sometimes favor user value over technical purity, and ability to articulate reasoning behind such decisions.

Nice to have

TypeScript and ReactFamiliarity with TypeScript and React ecosystem, allowing comfortable navigation across full stack when leveraging AI-assisted development. Ability to ship features across frontend and backend boundaries using AI tooling for frontend implementation.
Fintech and Payment SystemsExperience with fintech products, payment processing systems, PCI compliance requirements, or fraud detection systems. Understanding of banking partner requirements, card program operations, and regulatory considerations in financial services.
Travel Commerce DomainFamiliarity with travel industry systems including booking engines, inventory management across multiple suppliers, pricing algorithms, and disruption management workflows. Understanding of Airline and Hotel API integrations.
Multi-Tenant SaaS PlatformsProduction experience building and scaling multi-tenant SaaS platforms that serve diverse customers with custom configurations. Understanding of tenant isolation patterns, audit logging, and compliance considerations.
Event-Driven ArchitectureExperience building event-driven systems using message queues, stream processing, and publish-subscribe patterns. Familiarity with tools like Kafka, Pub/Sub, or similar event streaming platforms.
Go or PythonProficiency in Go, Python, Java, or other languages demonstrates stack-agnostic thinking. Ability to quickly learn new languages and apply distributed systems thinking across different tech stacks.
Autonomous Development WorkflowsExperience establishing development practices that leverage AI code generation, automated testing, and continuous integration to accelerate feature delivery. Track record of shipping 2-3x faster through effective AI integration.

Compensation & benefits

Salary

USD 180,000 – 250,000 (annual)

Apply for this position

You'll be redirected to the company's application page

Hopper

Hopper

View all jobs

Hopper is a travel booking app and online marketplace, leveraging data-driven technology to predict prices and help users book hotels, flights, and car rentals at the best rates.

Montreal, QC, CanadaFounded 2006hopper.com

Tech Stack

Languages
ScalaTypeScriptPython
Frameworks
ReactAkka/ZIOPlay Framework or Spring Boot
Databases
Cloud SQL/PostgreSQLCloud SpannerFirestore/Cloud DatastoreBigQuery
Tools
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)Pub/Sub and Event StreamingCloud Monitoring/ObservabilityCI/CD PipelineGitHub
Other
LLM and AI Agent FrameworksAPI Design StandardsContainerization and Orchestration
Apply Now

On this page