Senior Backend Engineer - Travel Product

Our Journey

Your Adventure Ahead

• Lead and deliver large‑scale travel platform components such as flight/hotel search, pricing/availability aggregation, booking flows, or content systems.
• Contribute to ideation, technical design, implementation, and testing of high‑impact travel product features.
• Design and build robust, scalable distributed systems capable of handling real‑time travel inventory and pricing.
• Architect clean, well‑structured APIs used by client applications for search, booking, and trip management.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Data, and UX teams to shape the future of the ShopBack Travel experience.
• Work with external partners (OTAs, GDS, suppliers) to integrate APIs, understand domain constraints, and improve reliability.
• Drive engineering best practices, mentor other engineers, and elevate technical standards within the team.
• Analyze complex requirements, propose pragmatic solutions, and articulate trade-offs clearly.

Essentials to Succeed

• 7+ years of experience building consumer‑facing platforms or distributed backend systems.
• Travel / OTA experience strongly preferred. Ideal candidates have prior experience working within the travel or OTA ecosystem — such as flight metasearch, hotel aggregation, activity marketplaces, travel content platforms, or GDS/LCC/API integrations — and understand the complexities of pricing, availability, and supplier systems.
• Experience with flight or hotel domains is a strong advantage: availability, fare rules, rates & inventory, ranking/relevance, caching strategy, or booking orchestration.
• Hands-on experience working with Node.js (preferred) or other backend technologies.
• Experience deploying applications into cloud environments (AWS highly desirable).
• Strong understanding of API design, microservices, and event-driven architecture.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, complex technical environment with high ambiguity.
• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across engineering, product, and third-party partners.
• Demonstrated use of Generative AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude) to develop new or improve workflows, enhance productivity, and drive efficiency at scale
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field

Technologies We Use & Love

• Cloud: AWS
• Infra: Kubernetes
• Programming languages: NodeJS / Typescript
• Relational database: Postgres
• Message queue: Kafka, SQS
• Continuous Integration: Gitlab
• Monitoring: DataDog
• Big Data: Redshift, Spark, S3, etc.
• Communication: Slack
• Project Management: JIRA / Confluence
• Other technologies:
• Knative Eventing / Serving
• Debezium + Kafka Connect

ShopBacker Traits

• Agency - We take ownership and act, rather than waiting for permission. When something's blocking progress, we find a way through it and follow through until it's done.
• Judgement - We aim for high-impact decisions, not just easy wins, and we put the bigger picture ahead of individual interests. That means moving quickly and confidently, while staying thoughtful about when a call really matters.
• Learning Velocity - We pick up new skills fast and let go of old habits just as quickly when something better comes along. We benchmark ourselves against the best and keep raising our own bar.
• Tenacity - We stay in it when things get hard, keeping a level head under pressure. We debate openly before deciding, then commit fully — and support each other along the way.

What's in it for ShopBackers

• Career growth opportunities to take on greater challenges that help you realise your ambitions.
• Be part of a winning team on a journey to global scale.
• Competitive compensation based on performance.
• Candid, open, and collaborative culture where feedback is valued.