Senior Backend Engineer - Fintech Payments, Scale & Impact

About the job

At Hopper, we’re on a mission to build the most customer-centric travel company on earth. We are leveraging the power that comes from combining massive amounts of data and machine learning to build the world’s fastest-growing mobile first travel marketplace - one that enables our customers to save money and travel better.

The vision of the payments team is to provide a magical and frictionless payment experience to our customers. We will do this by supporting all the major payment methods (‘unlocking choice’), optimizing our payment stack (‘frictionless payments’), and unifying and powering all payments flows at Hopper (Flights, Hotels, Homes, Rental Cars, Attractions & more) as well as our Hopper Cloud offering (Whitelabel solution).

Our long term vision is to remove any financial barriers to travel and truly make travel accessible to everyone. It’s cheaper, better and easier to purchase travel with Hopper!

In this role, you’ll be working alongside a team of talented engineers and partner with product, design, and data science to prioritize, estimate, and implement new product features in an Agile environment.

What would your day-to-day look like:

• Ship your first code in days, iterating on features in an Agile manner leveraging Scala and technologies like Spanner, pub/sub, GCP Big Query
• Build robust and performant infrastructure that supports millions of dollars of revenue
• Make important architectural decisions about core backend systems
• Coach and mentor developers at various stages of their career.
• Collaborate with a diverse group of people, giving and receiving feedback for growth
• Execute on big opportunities, helping Hopper rise to the top of the travel industry

An ideal candidate has:

• 8+ years experience thriving in backend engineering positions and delivering user experiences at scale
• A strong understanding of distributed systems and how architectural decisions affect performance and maintainability
• A strong understanding of site reliability and operations
• A passionate focus on quality, writing testable code that performs and scales
• Close collaboration with software engineers (backend and mobile), product managers, data scientists, and designers to deliver rapid value to end-users

Nice to have:

• Backend experience with Scala, Google Cloud, Kubernetes
• Experience developing B2B products with millions of MAU
• Experience in the Payments domain

Perks of working with us:

• Well-funded and proven startup with large ambitions, competitive salary, upsides of pre-IPO equity
• Monthly cash allowance to cover gym membership (100€) or telework (50€)
• Hopper covers the cost of employee premiums for private medical and dental coverage via Cigna.
• Coverage includes: primary medical assistance, dental care, nursing care, specialties, hospitalisation, maternity, preventative medicine and ambulatory services, and is available to extend to dependents.
• Hopper also offers private life and accident coverage via Surne.
• Unlimited PTO
• Puzl coworking All Access Pass OR Work-from-home stipend
• Entrepreneurial culture where pushing limits and taking risks is everyday business
• Open communication with management and company leadership
• Small, dynamic teams = massive impact

More about Hopper

At 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). By leveraging massive amounts of data and advanced machine learning algorithms, Hopper combines its world-class travel agency offering with proprietary fintech products to bring transparency, flexibility and savings to travelers globally.

We have developed several unique fintech solutions that address everything from pricing volatility to trip disruptions – helping people travel better and save more on their trips. The Hopper platform serves hundreds of millions of travelers globally and continues to capture market share around the world. Ranked the third largest online travel agency in North America, the Hopper app has been downloaded over 120 million times and has become largely popular among younger travelers – with 70% of its users being Gen Z and millennials.

While everyone knows us as the Gen Z and Millennial travel app, Hopper has evolved to become much more than that. In recent years, we’ve grown into a global travel agency and travel fintech provider that powers some of the world’s largest brands.

Through HTS, our B2B division, the company supercharges its partners’ direct channels by integrating our fintech products on their sites or powering end-to-end travel portals. Today, our partners include leading travel brands like Capital One, Nubank, Air Canada and many more.

Here are just a few stats that demonstrate the company’s recent growth:

• Hopper sells billion worth of travel and travel fintech every year. In 2023, over 1.3 billion trips were planned through the Hopper app and our HTS partnerships.
• Our fintech products – including Price Freeze, Flexibility for Any Reason and Flight Disruption Assistance – have exceptionally strong CSAT because the terms are always clear, and customers receive instant, no-questions-asked resolutions.
• Almost 30% of our app customers purchase at least one fintech product when making a booking; and consumers are 1.6x more likely to repurchase if they add fintech to their booking vs if they booked just travel.
• Given the success of its fintech products, Hopper launched a B2B initiative, HTS (Hopper Technology Solutions), which represents more than 50% of the business.
• Through HTS, any travel provider (airlines, hotels, banks, travel agencies, etc.) can integrate and seamlessly distribute Hopper’s fintech or travel inventory on their direct channels.
• As its first HTS partnership, the company partnered with Capital One to co-develop Capital One Travel, a new travel portal designed specifically for cardholders. Other HTS partners include Air Canada, Uber, CommBank, Nubank, Flair Airlines with many more in the pipeline.

Featured in Apple’s Best of the App Store list of Essential Travel Apps in 2023 and recognized by the likes of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, Hopper has been downloaded over 120 million times and continues to have millions of new installs each month. Hopper is now the #3 largest online travel agency in North America and 70% of our app customers are Gen-Z and millennials travelers.

Hopper has raised over $750 million USD of private capital and is backed by some of the largest institutional investors and banks in the world. Hopper is primed to continue its acceleration as the world’s fastest-growing mobile-first travel marketplace.