Software Engineer - Flights

About The Job

Join the core Flights Platform team at Hopper, where your contributions will directly impact a high‑growth, global travel ecosystem that handles millions of users and high‑volume, real‑time transactions daily.

This role offers significant feature ownership and a chance to deep‑dive into the technical complexities of the airline industry. You will be instrumental in developing and evolving the mission‑critical systems that power Hopper’s core flight booking engine.

Your work will be highly visible and directly responsible for:

• Driving Core Feature Delivery:
  Taking ownership of major feature releases across the entire flight booking funnel—from flight search to booking creation and post‑booking fulfillment.
• Impacting Global Reach:
  Building scalable services that integrate new airline partners and support our B2B distribution network, enabling Hopper’s growth worldwide.
• System Reliability:
  Contributing directly to the design and implementation of highly resilient, low‑latency services that ensure a trustworthy and seamless experience for customers under high load.

You will be embedded within a cross‑functional team, making substantial code contributions to a complex, high‑throughput microservices environment. Key areas of contribution include:

• End‑to‑End Feature Development:
  Designing, implementing, and deploying high‑quality code for new flight product features, taking them from concept to production.
• System Enhancement:
  Participating actively in discussions around system design, identifying opportunities to improve service scalability, performance, and monitoring (SLOs/SLAs).
• Integration Projects:
  Leading the technical implementation of new integrations with external airline and GDS partners, navigating complex communication protocols and data schemas.
• Code Quality and Mentorship:
  Upholding high standards for code quality through thorough code reviews, mentoring more junior engineers on best practices, and driving engineering excellence.

• Implementation and Review:
  Writing clean, performant code, contributing significantly to the codebase, and performing code reviews to maintain quality and share knowledge.
• Technical Problem Solving:
  Collaborating with senior engineers to troubleshoot, debug, and resolve challenging production issues in a distributed system.
• Requirements Planning:
  Partnering with Product Managers and Product Operations to understand business requirements, decompose features into technical tasks, and estimate delivery timelines.
• System Exploration:
  Deeply exploring and improving the existing codebase and contributing to engineering improvements for the core flights product.

• Feature Ownership Track Record: A working history of owning the technical implementation, testing, and deployment of features throughout the development life cycle.
• System Contribution:
  Experience working on and contributing to the design of highly available microservices in a production environment.
• Language Proficiency:
  Strong proficiency in Scala or other JVM languages, such as Java/Kotlin.
• Distributed Systems
  
  Experience:
  
  Familiarity with various service communication methods, including gRPC, Pub/Sub, and REST, and practical experience working in a distributed environment.
• Collaboration and Communication:
  Excellent communication skills, demonstrating an ability to effectively collaborate with developers, product managers, and operations teams to achieve feature goals.

• Well‑funded and proven startup with large ambitions, competitive salary, upsides of pre‑IPO equity packages
• Uncapped quarterly paid performance bonus.
• Unlimited PTO.
• Carrot Cash travel stipend.
• Access to co‑working space on demand through Flex Desk AND Work‑from‑home stipend.
• 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…