Backend Software Engineer - Commerce Foundations; Remote

About the Job

Did you know Hopper technology powers some of the largest travel portals in the world? Our Hopper Technology Solutions (HTS) platform drives travel purchases for major global brands from banks to airlines to fintech leaders. This platform is essentially a configurable, multi-tenant travel commerce engine, enabling partners to launch world-class hotel and travel booking experiences faster, with less custom engineering.

Commerce Foundations team is the core of this engine. While our product teams focus on the "what," Foundations focuses on the "how." We build scalable, resilient, and extensible systems—booking flows, search orchestration, checkout journeys, and platform capabilities—that power Stays and Packages across multiple partner portals worldwide.

As a Staff Engineer
, you aren't just building features; you are architecting the foundational patterns that allow our entire engineering org to scale. You will work as a technical leader within a cross-functional team of exceptional engineers, designers, and product managers to ensure our commerce engine is world-class.

• Architectural Strategy: Move beyond individual features to design the underlying patterns for booking flows, checkout journeys, and multi-tenant configurations.

• Technical Stewardship: Define the "North Star" for our Scala-based distributed systems, ensuring our move toward global scale is met with robust, maintainable patterns.

• Multi-Tenant Excellence: Lead the evolution of our platform to support "configuration over customization," allowing partners to launch world-class experiences with zero‑touch engineering.

• Mentorship & Influence: Raise the bar for the entire engineering org by conducting deep‑dive design reviews, mentoring senior engineers, and fostering a culture of high‑ownership and asynchronous decision‑making.

• Backend & Distributed Systems: Our core services are written in Scala
  , leveraging functional programming patterns to maintain high concurrency, type safety, and reliability across our global commerce engine.

• Cloud Infrastructure: We are native to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), utilizing a suite of managed services (including GKE, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Spanner) to power a resilient, multi‑tenant architecture.

• Frontend Foundations: Our partner‑facing portals are built with React and Type Script , requiring clean, well‑documented API contracts and full‑stack solutions that enable seamless integration.

• Architectural Sovereignty: Lead the design, build, and operate API and full‑stack solutions that serve as the "source of truth" for Stays and Packages across all HTS partners.

• Systemic Improvement: Proactively explore and resolve engineering improvements for the team and the product—identifying bottlenecks in the codebase or infrastructure that hinder scale.

• High‑Alignment Leadership: Operate with extreme autonomy, working closely with fellow engineers, designers, and PMs to ensure high alignment on complex technical roadmaps without the need for constant meetings.

• Cross‑Functional Influence: Collaborate cross‑functionally with the product team, other Hopper teams, and external partner teams to ensure foundational logic is robust and extensible.

• Asynchronous Excellence: Drive decision‑making through high‑quality documentation and asynchronous communication, thriving in our low‑meeting, high‑alignment culture.

• Technical Fearlessness: A natural drive to fearlessly deep dive into an unknown, complex code base to untangle logic and implement elegant abstractions while keeping eyes on the goal to deliver results fast.

• Foundational Product Thinking: Strong product thinking: your conception of quality is anchored in the customer, but you understand that a great experience is built on a stable, predictable commerce engine.

• Mastery of Distributed Systems: Deep experience with (or a proven ability to rapidly master) distributed system development in Scala
  . You understand the trade‑offs of consistency, availability, and latency in a global environment.

• Multi‑Tenant Mindset: You prioritize "configuration over customization," building modular…