Principal Backend Engineer, Integrations - 100% remote - EMEA

NOTE: This is a FULLY remote role, but the candidate must be within the EMEA region to collaborate with their team, peers, and internal customers. You do not have to be in the specific country or city shown in this listing, but please only apply if you are physically based within the European region.

Trusted by 20,000+ property managers worldwide, Hostaway is an industry leading, AI-powered vacation rental management platform designed for professional short‑term rental operators. Hostaway brings everything together for greater efficiency and faster growth.

About The Role

Hostaway is seeking a highly motivated Principal Backend Engineer to join the Core team. This team is responsible for the integrations with our key partners (Online Travel Agencies). These integrations are critical to our customers' daily workflows, powering seamless connectivity between their properties and major booking platforms. If you've built and evolved similar systems that handle huge volumes and interact with a variety of complex APIs, you'll be a great fit!

Principal Engineers are expected to own the long‑term technical vision for their domain, having a clear view of the architectural challenges and how to remediate them over time. Having a close relationship with the domain's Product Manager is key. While the PM brings the what, you are their peer responsible for bringing the how — and actively shaping the problem space itself. Digging deep into the business problem the PM is trying to solve is key to be able to make the right decisions on how to shape the technical solution for the team to work on. You'll partner with an Engineering Manager, who will help coordinate the team's day‑day work, maintain a sustainable delivery pace, and ensure the team is set up for success. Together, you'll break down complex projects into manageable tasks and drive continuous improvement in our engineering practices. You'll also act as a force multiplier across teams, raising the technical bar beyond your immediate domain.

Job Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in SaaS software development, with at least 5 years in a technical leadership role (Staff, Principal, or Architect)
• Expert‑level proficiency in any backend language or platform, with a strong willingness to dive deep into PHP + Go, as these are the primary languages we use in this domain
• Strong understanding of relational databases (like MySQL or PostgreSQL)
• Proven experience in transitioning event‑driven service oriented architectures by applying Domain Driven Design (DDD) principles
• Experience in designing and developing RESTful web APIs
• Strong experience in writing Unit Tests and Integration Tests (jest or something similar)
• Experience working in a Cloud environment (AWS required)
• Experience with message queues (e.g., AWS SQS)
• English language level C1

Nice to Have Skills

• Experience with NoSQL databases (like DynamoDB or MongoDB)
• Experience building cloud native apps, leveraging AWS managed services
• Having used PHP in the past or not afraid to dive into some of the current PHP business logic
• A track record of coaching and mentoring
• Extreme Programming (XP) agile practices across multiple teams
• Front‑end experience with React and micro‑frontends
• Knowledge of containerisation technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) and DevSecOps practices

An Average Day for a Principal Engineer

• 10:00‑10:15 Quick team stand‑up, one of your team members seem to be working on a problem you worked on before, and offer to pair with them after the stand‑up to support
• 10:30‑14:00 Pairing with one of your team members to work on a complex scalability issue together and grabbing a quick bite to re‑fuel those pesky braincells in‑between coding sessions!
• 14:00‑15:00 Doing a design session with the Product Manager and UX designer for a large upcoming feature that the team should pick up next week. You ask a lot of questions to drill down to the problem we are trying to solve, and suggest some easier solutions that require less effort for the team.
• 15:00‑16:00 The design session triggered some thoughts about other areas of the system that will be affected. You’re doing a quick dive in the affected areas of the code and find some technical debt that might affect the system’s scalability or reliability. You create a brief Jira ticket and tag the Product Manager to help get it prioritised and to ensure it is not forgotten. You also ping the ticket to one of the other domains' tech leads, as you recall them mentioning a similar problem existing in another domain team.
• 16:00‑16:30 Quick catch‑up with the Engineering Manager on the teams delivery reliability and how you can help keep Work in Progress (WIP) and Pull Request (PR) review time to a minimum
• 16:30‑18:00 Talking about PR’s, there are actually still a few open. You take the last part of the day to review your teams PRs. There are some great solutions offered, but one of the junior engineers introduced some code that is difficult to maintain and is lacking unit tests. You jump on a quick call with them to explain the issues and why it matters.

What We Offer

• Competitive Compensation: We offer competitive pay based on market rates in the country of the applicant.
• 100% Remote: Enjoy the freedom to work from anywhere within your country of residence—be it a co‑working space, your home office, or even your dining room table. The choice is yours.
• Equity: Every role in our company comes with valuable stock options in a fast‑growing and profitable company.
• Values‑Driven Leadership: Our Core Values are not just words we’ve written to make us feel good. We leverage them daily when making strategic and tactical decisions.
• Professional Growth: Our rapid growth offers unparalleled learning and development opportunities, along with a multitude of career advancement opportunities.
• Annual Paid Leave: The specific amounts vary by country and are aligned with country and/or contract‑specific norms.
• Geographic Specific Benefits: As an international employer, we offer different country‑specific benefits such as Health Insurance and Pensions in countries where these perks are customary.
• Dynamic Team Culture: As a global company with team members in over 40 countries, our diverse and international culture fuels our innovation and creativity, providing a key pillar to our success.

Thank you for your interest. If you apply for this role, you will receive an email from our Talent Acquisition team after your application has been reviewed alongside the qualifications for this role and the qualifications of others who have applied.