Senior Software Engineer - Backend

HotelTonight makes it remarkably easy to book great hotels at amazing rates on your mobile device for tonight, tomorrow and beyond. Our goal is to be the premier and most loved way to book a place to stay and we’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help do just that.

We’re seeking teammates who want to set the standard, question the status quo, and want to keep learning. Part of the greater Product Development team, the Core Services team focuses on the back-end services and infrastructure that support iOS and Android features of the consumer facing app. We are a team of builders; we like to solve problems, take action, and work collaboratively with others to get stuff done.

This is a great opportunity for an engineer who is passionate about the product, thinks of the users, and wants to utilize the latest technologies to deliver industry-changing products. HotelTonight now allows users to book a hotel up to 100 days in advance - an exciting expansion for many reasons, but it’s also a significant change to our backend infrastructure. This means there are some big, challenging projects ahead for you and the rest of the Platform team to tackle.

You’ll have an immediate impact, ensuring that our APIs, infrastructure, and internal tools create a world class user experience and help HotelTonight on its mission to become the only hotel booking app you need on your phone.

Within 1 month, you will

• Familiarize yourself with our development workflow, tooling and tech stack
• Learn about the upcoming initiatives and projects you’ll be owning
• Release bug fixes and feature improvements to our production environment
• Actively participate in our code review process

Within 3 months, you will

• Collaborate with other engineers, product managers, designers, and domain experts to iterate on and improve core business logic and user-facing features
• Develop, modify, and maintain our e-commerce platform while optimizing for speed, user experience, and continued 99.99% availability
• Support critical production systems as part of our on-call rotation
• Leverage instrumentation to identify and diagnose performance bottlenecks
• Own the delivery and deployment of the services you build into our containerized production cluster

Within 12 months you'll do

• Lead end-to-end development of mission-critical features
• Work on managing and scaling the infrastructure that enables our services to process millions of requests per day
• Evaluate and experiment with new technologies and techniques that can be added to our tech stack to solve the trickiest of problems
• Work alongside other engineers to define the future of HotelTonight's core services

Why this opportunity is cool

• You’ll be able to directly contribute to and shape the systems that power HotelTonight’s marketplace
• You’ll work alongside and be exposed to senior leaders across the company; an opportunity to learn and grow from those around you
• You’ll work with other teams across the company on a wide range of projects, ranging from end-user-facing features to behind-the-scenes improvements to our bookings, payments, and notifications platforms
• You’ll help implement and refine best practices for deploying, monitoring, alerting, and performance testing critical services

What you will need to be successful in this role

• Extensive experience in software development working as a Backend Engineer
• Strong expertise in Ruby and RSpec (or similar) and an interest in other languages (e.g. Golang, Elixir)
• Working knowledge of relational databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL
• Familiarity with any of the following is a plus: AWS, Ansible, Docker, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Packer, RabbitMQ (or other queueing systems), Terraform, Redis
• Experience scaling and maintaining high-traffic, service-oriented production systems
• Ability to tackle broad, challenging problems in an analytical, pragmatic way
• Empathy for users, teammates, and other stakeholders
• Love working as part of a team and continuously strive for self-improvement