Senior Backend Engineer - Real-Time Booking & Microservices in Edinburgh

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 that handles high-volume, real-time transactions.

As a senior-level individual contributor, you will navigate a complex microservices environment to deliver reliable booking fulfillment, integrate new lodging and cars partners into our core stack, and optimize 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 while navigating complex communication protocols and distributed data schemas.
• Write clean, performant code in Scala or other JVM languages to maintain, evolve, and uphold rigorous engineering standards for mission-critical lodging services.
• Explore and troubleshoot existing complex codebases to deep-dive into infrastructure and resolve production issues in a distributed system environment.
• Partner with Product Managers and Operations to decompose business requirements into technical tasks and estimate delivery timelines.
• Take full ownership of the development lifecycle for new product features, from initial technical implementation and testing to production deployment.
• Contribute to the design of highly resilient, low-latency services to ensure a seamless booking experience for customers under high load.
• Participate in thorough code reviews and identify opportunities to optimize scalability, performance, and system health.

An ideal candidate has:

• Strong proficiency in Scala or other JVM languages, such as Java or Kotlin, with a focus on building scalable, high-throughput services.
• A proven track record of owning the technical implementation, testing, and deployment of features within a microservices architecture.
• Practical experience with distributed systems and service communication methods including gRPC, Pub/Sub, and REST.
• The ability to onboard quickly and handle technical ambiguity by independently exploring and executing technical plans within existing infrastructure.
• Excellent communication skills and a "bias for action" to effectively collaborate with cross-functional squads in a remote-first environment.
• A professional curiosity for the travel tech industry and a commercial mindset focused on delivering reliable booking fulfillment.

Perks and benefits of working with us:

• Well-funded and proven startup with large ambitions, competitive salary, upsides of pre-IPO equity packages.
• Hopper covers 100% of the premiums for the employee for a group insurance plan through Vitality Health.
• Automatic contributions when you start with Hopper through Smart Pension.
• Access to co-working space on demand through FlexDesk AND Work-from-home stipend.
• Carrot Cash travel stipend.
• Unlimited PTO.
• Entrepreneurial culture where pushing limits and taking risks is everyday business.
• Open communication with management and company leadership.
• Small, dynamic teams = massive impact.

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.