Backend Software Engineer

Compensation: $200,000 – $240,000 base + equity

A consumer-facing technology company operating a high-traffic digital marketplace in the travel and hospitality space. The platform supports complex booking, pricing, and availability workflows and integrates with multiple external partners. The company is product-led, engineering-driven, and focused on building reliable, scalable systems that power customer-facing experiences.

We’re hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to serve as a technical anchor for the core marketplace platform. Reporting to engineering leadership, you’ll help define backend architecture, guide long-term technical direction, and drive execution across business-critical systems.

This role has broad influence across product, platform, and partner-facing domains, with a strong emphasis on architecture, correctness, performance, reliability, and mentorship. The role is based in New York City.

• Set backend architectural direction for core marketplace domains (pricing, availability, booking, partner integrations)
• Partner with engineering leadership to define and execute the backend architecture roadmap
• Lead design reviews and RFCs for major system changes, ensuring clarity and consistency across teams
• Improve scalability, throughput, latency, and reliability of an existing backend platform
• Define and enforce API contract standards to reduce breakage and accelerate iteration
• Design and operate robust integrations with external partner systems, including sync workflows and reconciliation
• Raise engineering quality through code reviews, mentorship, and setting standards around testing and observability
• Own systems in production, with a strong focus on monitoring, incident response, and continuous improvement
• Backend: Ruby on Rails, Node.js
• Infrastructure: AWS, ECS

• 8+ years building production backend systems with significant scope and impact
• Experience leading large, business-critical initiatives end-to-end (rewrites, migrations, platform foundations)
• Strong backend architecture judgment and ability to make pragmatic tradeoffs
• Deep experience with data modeling and distributed system reliability
• Ability to influence across teams without direct authority
• Strong operational ownership mindset beyond initial launch
• Proven ability to mentor engineers and raise engineering standards