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

Hopper is a leading travel platform globally, and they are seeking a Staff Backend Software Engineer for their Commerce Foundations team. The role involves architecting scalable systems for their travel commerce engine and providing technical leadership to ensure high-quality solutions across multiple partner portals.

Responsibilities:

• Architectural Strategy: Move beyond individual features to design the underlying patterns for booking flows, checkout journeys, and multi-tenant configurations
• Technical Stewardship: Define the "North Star" for our Scala-based distributed systems, ensuring our move toward global scale is met with robust, maintainable patterns
• Multi-Tenant Excellence: Lead the evolution of our platform to support "configuration over customization," allowing partners to launch world-class experiences with zero-touch engineering
• Mentorship & Influence: Raise the bar for the entire engineering org by conducting deep-dive design reviews, mentoring senior engineers, and fostering a culture of high-ownership and asynchronous decision-making
• Architectural Sovereignty: Lead the design, build, and operate API and full-stack solutions that serve as the "source of truth" for Stays and Packages across all HTS partners
• Systemic Improvement: Proactively explore and resolve engineering improvements for the team and the product—identifying bottlenecks in the codebase or infrastructure that hinder scale
• High-Alignment Leadership: Operate with extreme autonomy, working closely with fellow engineers, designers, and PMs to ensure high alignment on complex technical roadmaps without the need for constant meetings
• Cross-Functional Influence: Collaborate cross-functionally with the product team, other Hopper teams, and external partner teams to ensure foundational logic is robust and extensible
• Asynchronous Excellence: Drive decision-making through high-quality documentation and asynchronous communication, thriving in our low-meeting, high-alignment culture

Requirements:

• Strong product thinking: your conception of quality is anchored in the customer, but you understand that a great experience is built on a stable, predictable commerce engine
• Deep experience with (or a proven ability to rapidly master) distributed system development in Scala
• You understand the trade-offs of consistency, availability, and latency in a global environment
• You prioritize 'configuration over customization,' building modular systems that support N partners with minimal manual intervention
• You can distinguish between what has to be right from the start and what can be iterated on, balancing long-term health with the need for speed