Senior Backend Software Engineer - APIs & Platform

Job Description

Job Description

Senior Backend Software Engineer – APIs & Platform

Location: New York, NY
Employment Type: Full-Time
Work Arrangement: In-office 4 days per week

About the Opportunity

We’re seeking an experienced Backend Software Engineer to help build and scale a modern booking platform that powers seamless reservation experiences, pricing and availability, and external API integrations.

This is a hands-on engineering opportunity for someone who enjoys solving complex backend challenges, designing reliable systems, and building technology that supports real-world transactions at scale. The ideal candidate brings strong backend development experience, sound data-modeling skills, and a focus on reliability, performance, and maintainable code.

Staff-level engineers with significant platform architecture and technical leadership experience are also encouraged to apply.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs supporting booking and reservation workflows.
• Build integrations that enable external partners and systems to access pricing, availability, booking, modification, and cancellation functionality.
• Develop reliable transactional workflows that maintain data consistency and prevent duplicate or incorrect operations.
• Design and optimize relational data models to support complex business logic and transaction processing.
• Implement resilient systems with appropriate error handling, recovery mechanisms, monitoring, and observability.
• Troubleshoot production issues and improve system performance, scalability, and reliability.
• Collaborate with product managers, engineers, and cross-functional teams to deliver high-quality platform capabilities.
• Contribute to technical design decisions, code quality, testing practices, and engineering standards.
• For Staff-level candidates, provide broader technical direction, guide architectural decisions, and establish reusable patterns across teams.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated experience and impact.
• Strong hands-on backend development experience using technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Node.js, or comparable frameworks.
• Experience designing, developing, and maintaining APIs and third-party integrations.
• Strong understanding of relational databases, data modeling, and transaction management.
• Experience building systems where data accuracy, consistency, and reliability are essential.
• Familiarity with production monitoring, debugging, observability, and performance optimization.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS.
• Ability to work collaboratively while independently owning technical problems from design through production.
• Strong communication skills and a practical, solution-oriented approach to engineering challenges.

Additional Experience That May Be Helpful

• Experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, OpenSearch, or Datadog.
• Background in booking, reservations, payments, orders, inventory, or other transaction-heavy platforms.
• Experience improving API reliability, idempotency, fault tolerance, and system recovery.
• For Staff-level candidates, experience shaping platform architecture, mentoring engineers, and influencing technical direction across teams.

What We're Looking For

We’re looking for engineers who combine strong technical fundamentals with a practical, ownership-driven mindset. You should enjoy building dependable systems, solving complex integration challenges, and working with a collaborative team to deliver meaningful product improvements.

Direct applicants only. Third-party agencies and subcontractors will not be considered.