Staff Backend Software Engineer - Commerce Foundations (100% Remote - Bulgaria)

📋 Description

• • As a Staff Backend Software Engineer on the Commerce Foundations team at Hopper Inc., you will play a pivotal role in architecting and developing the core systems that power global travel commerce for major brands. This is a unique opportunity to influence the foundational patterns of a highly scalable, resilient, and extensible platform, moving beyond feature development to shape the very "how" of our booking flows, search orchestration, checkout journeys, and multi-tenant capabilities.
• • You will be a technical leader within a dynamic, cross-functional team comprising exceptional engineers, designers, and product managers. Your primary focus will be on ensuring the Commerce Foundations engine is not just functional, but world-class, setting the standard for reliability and scalability across multiple partner portals worldwide.
• • A key aspect of this role involves driving the architectural strategy for our distributed systems. You will be responsible for defining the "North Star" for our Scala-based backend, ensuring that our evolution towards global scale is underpinned by robust, maintainable, and elegant patterns. This includes designing the underlying architecture for complex booking flows, intricate checkout journeys, and sophisticated multi-tenant configurations.
• • You will champion multi-tenant excellence, leading the charge in evolving our platform to prioritize "configuration over customization." The goal is to empower partners to launch sophisticated, world-class travel booking experiences with minimal to zero-touch engineering, significantly reducing their time-to-market and operational overhead.
• • As a Staff Engineer, your influence will extend across the entire engineering organization. You will be instrumental in raising the bar for technical excellence by conducting rigorous deep-dive design reviews, actively mentoring senior engineers, and fostering a culture that values high ownership, proactive problem-solving, and effective asynchronous decision-making.
• • Your day-to-day responsibilities will include leading the design, build, and operation of both API and full-stack solutions that serve as the definitive "source of truth" for Stays and Packages across all Hopper Technology Solutions (HTS) partners. This requires a deep understanding of distributed systems and a commitment to building highly available and consistent services.
• • You will proactively identify and address engineering improvements, scrutinizing the codebase and infrastructure for bottlenecks that might hinder scalability. This involves a continuous effort to optimize performance, enhance reliability, and ensure the long-term maintainability of our systems.
• • Operating with extreme autonomy, you will collaborate closely with fellow engineers, designers, and Product Managers. The emphasis is on achieving high alignment on complex technical roadmaps through clear communication and well-defined processes, minimizing the need for constant, synchronous meetings.
• • Cross-functional collaboration is essential. You will work closely with the product team, other Hopper engineering teams, and external partner teams to ensure that our foundational logic is not only robust but also highly extensible, capable of adapting to future business needs and partner requirements.
• • Embracing asynchronous excellence, you will drive decision-making through high-quality documentation and effective asynchronous communication channels. This approach is fundamental to our low-meeting, high-alignment culture, allowing for focused work and efficient progress.
• • The ideal candidate possesses technical fearlessness, demonstrating a natural drive to dive deep into complex, potentially unknown codebases. You will untangle intricate logic, implement elegant abstractions, and maintain a clear focus on delivering results rapidly.
• • Strong foundational product thinking is crucial. Your conception of quality will be anchored in the customer experience, understanding that a truly great user journey is built upon a stable, predictable, and high-performing commerce engine.
• • Mastery of distributed systems is a core requirement. You should possess deep experience with, or a proven ability to rapidly master, distributed system development, particularly in Scala. A thorough understanding of the trade-offs between consistency, availability, and latency in a global environment is essential.
• • A multi-tenant mindset is paramount. You will prioritize building modular, configurable systems that can efficiently support a large number of partners with minimal manual intervention, embodying the "configuration over customization" philosophy.
• • Finally, you will bring a pragmatic vision to the role, adept at distinguishing between elements that require immediate perfection and those that can be iterated upon. This balance between long-term system health and the imperative for speed is key to our success.