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

📋 Description

• • As a Staff Backend Software Engineer on the Commerce Foundations team at Hopper Inc., you will play a pivotal role in architecting and building the core engine that powers global travel commerce for major brands. This is a unique opportunity to move beyond feature development and shape the foundational patterns that enable our entire engineering organization to scale effectively.
• • The Commerce Foundations team is at the heart of Hopper Technology Solutions (HTS), responsible for the "how" behind our configurable, multi-tenant travel commerce engine. You will be instrumental in developing scalable, resilient, and extensible systems, including booking flows, search orchestration, checkout journeys, and other critical platform capabilities that support Stays and Packages across numerous partner portals worldwide.
• • Your primary focus will be on architectural strategy, designing the underlying patterns for complex booking flows, seamless checkout journeys, and sophisticated multi-tenant configurations. This involves defining the technical "North Star" for our Scala-based distributed systems, ensuring our trajectory towards global scale is supported by robust, maintainable, and high-performing patterns.
• • A key aspect of this role is driving multi-tenant excellence. You will lead the evolution of our platform to prioritize "configuration over customization," enabling partners to launch world-class travel booking experiences with minimal to zero-touch engineering, thereby significantly reducing their time-to-market and operational overhead.
• • As a Staff Engineer, you will also serve as a technical leader and mentor. This includes conducting deep-dive design reviews, guiding and mentoring senior engineers, and actively fostering a culture of high ownership, technical rigor, and asynchronous decision-making across the engineering organization.
• • Your day-to-day responsibilities will encompass architectural sovereignty, leading the design, build, and operation of API and full-stack solutions that act as the definitive "source of truth" for Stays and Packages across all HTS partners. This requires a deep understanding of distributed systems and a commitment to operational excellence.
• • You will proactively identify and address systemic improvements, exploring and resolving engineering bottlenecks in the codebase or infrastructure that could impede scalability and performance. This proactive approach is crucial for maintaining a high-performing platform.
• • The role demands high-alignment leadership, operating with extreme autonomy. You will collaborate closely with fellow engineers, designers, and Product Managers to ensure strong alignment on complex technical roadmaps, minimizing the need for constant meetings and fostering efficient workflows.
• • Cross-functional influence is also a critical component. You will collaborate with product teams, other Hopper engineering teams, and external partner teams to ensure foundational logic is not only robust but also highly extensible to meet diverse partner needs.
• • Embracing asynchronous excellence is key to our culture. You will drive decision-making through high-quality documentation and effective asynchronous communication, thriving in an environment that prioritizes focused work over excessive meetings.
• • The ideal candidate possesses technical fearlessness, a natural drive to dive deep into complex, potentially unknown codebases, untangle intricate logic, and implement elegant abstractions while maintaining a sharp focus on delivering results rapidly.
• • Strong foundational product thinking is essential. Your conception of quality will be anchored in the customer experience, coupled with a deep understanding that a superior customer experience is fundamentally built upon a stable, predictable, and highly performant commerce engine.
• • Mastery of distributed systems is a core requirement. You should have deep experience with, or a proven ability to rapidly master, distributed system development in Scala. A thorough understanding of the trade-offs between consistency, availability, and latency in a global environment is paramount.
• • A multi-tenant mindset is crucial. You will prioritize "configuration over customization," designing and building modular systems that can efficiently support a large number of partners with minimal manual intervention.
• • Finally, pragmatic vision is highly valued. You should be adept at distinguishing between what requires immediate perfection and what can be iterated upon, effectively balancing long-term system health with the imperative for speed and agility in a fast-paced environment.