Hopper
Senior Backend Engineer - Lodging and Cars
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About the Role
Join the Lodging and Cars Supply team at the heart of our lodging and cars business unit, where you will be instrumental in scaling a global hotel and cars ecosystem handling high-volume, real-time transactions.
As a senior-level individual contributor, you will:
- Navigate a complex microservices environment
- Deliver reliable booking fulfillment
- Integrate new lodging and cars partners into the core stack
- Optimise system monitoring
This role is designed for a self-directed engineer who excels at system exploration and immediate technical execution within an established, high-growth travel environment.
What Would Your Day-to-Day Look Like?
- Execute end-to-end technical integrations with external lodgings, cars, and GDS partners
- Navigate complex communication protocols and distributed data schemas
- Write clean, performant code in Scala or other JVM languages to:
- Maintain
- Evolve
- Uphold rigorous engineering standards for mission-critical lodging services
- Explore and troubleshoot existing complex codebases to:
- Deep-dive into infrastructure
- Resolve production issues in a distributed system environment
- Partner with:
- Product Managers
- Operations
- Break down business requirements into technical tasks
- Estimate delivery timelines
- Take full ownership of the development lifecycle for:
- Initial technical implementation
- Testing
- Deployment to production
- Contribute to the design of highly resilient, low-latency services for a seamless booking experience under high load
- Participate in thorough code reviews; identify opportunities for optimizing:
- Scalability
- Performance
- System health
Ideal Candidate
- Strong proficiency in:
- Scala
- JVM languages (e.g., Java, Kotlin)
- Focus on building scalable, high-throughput services
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Proven track record of owning:
- Technical implementation
- Testing
- Deployment of features within a microservices architecture
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Practical experience with:
- Distributed systems
- Service communication methods:
- gRPC
- Pub/Sub
- REST
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Ability to:
- Onboard quickly
- Handle technical ambiguity by:
- Independently exploring technical plans
- Executing within existing infrastructure
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Excellent communication skills; a "bias for action" to:
- Collaborate effectively with cross-functional squads in a remote-first environment
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Professional curiosity for the travel tech industry and commercial mindset for delivering reliable booking fulfillment
Perks and Benefits
-
Well-funded and proven startup with large ambitions, offering:
- Competitive salary
- Pre-IPO equity packages
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Group insurance plan (andidate covers 100% premiums) via Vitality Health
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Automatic contributions to Smart Pension upon joining
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Generous parental leave, far above industry standards
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FlexDesk access (co-working space on demand)
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Work-from-home stipend
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Carrot Cash travel stipend
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Unlimited PTO
-
Entrepreneurial culture where:
- Pushing limits
- Taking risks
- Are part of everyday business
-
Open communication with:
- Management
- Company leadership
-
Small, dynamic teams equate to massive impact
About Hopper
We are on a mission to become the leading travel platform globally, powering Hopper’s mobile app, website, and our B2B business, HTS (Hopper Technology Solutions).
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By leveraging massive amounts of data and advanced machine learning algorithms, we fuse our travel agency expertise with proprietary fintech products, delivering:
- Transparency
- Flexibility
- Savings to travelers worldwide
Our unique fintech solutions address:
- Pricing volatility
- Trip disruptions
- Bookings with one-click additions
The Hopper platform serves:
- Hundreds of millions of travelers globally
Aspects of sustainability include:
- Regional success, exemplified by:
- 120M+ app downloads
- 70% of users are Gen Z or Millennials
- #1 most innovative travel company (per Fast Company)
Supporting the market growth, we have:
- raised over $750 million USD
- Backed by some of the largest institutional investors and banks
- HTS leading as a primary growth driver in a $1 trillion online shopping category
We continually "supercharge" partners' direct channels by integrating fintech products or powering end-to-end travel portals via HTS.
Additional Insights
-
B2B partnership highlights:
- Capital One Travel (developed with Capital One)
- Partners with leading brands like Air Canada, Uber, CommBank, Nubank, Flair Airlines
-
Our fintech success:
- 30% of app customers purchase at least one financial product when booking.
- 1.6x higher repurchase likelihood when fintech products are used alongside travel bookings.
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Our Customers’ rapidly improving travel experience: Exceptional CSAT scores* (high customer satisfaction) for products like Cancel for Any Reason and Flight Disruption Assistance
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Fleet and community driven:
- Hopper is ranked #3 largest online travel agency in North America.
Hopper invites innovation: “Come take off with us!”.
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