Who you are

• Technical Fearlessness: A natural drive to fearlessly deep dive into an unknown, complex code base to untangle logic and implement elegant abstractions while keeping eyes on the goal to deliver results fast
• Foundational Product Thinking: 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
• Mastery of Distributed Systems: 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
• Multi-Tenant Mindset: You prioritize "configuration over customization," building modular systems that support N partners with minimal manual intervention
• Pragmatic Vision: 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

What the job involves

• Did you know Hopper technology powers some of the largest travel portals in the world? Our Hopper Technology Solutions (HTS) platform drives travel purchases for major global brands from banks to airlines to fintech leaders
• This platform is essentially a configurable, multi-tenant travel commerce engine, enabling partners to launch world-class hotel and travel booking experiences faster, with less custom engineering
• The Commerce Foundations team is the core of this engine. While our product teams focus on the "what," Foundations focuses on the "how"
• We build scalable, resilient, and extensible systems—booking flows, search orchestration, checkout journeys, and platform capabilities—that power Stays and Packages across multiple partner portals worldwide
• As a Staff Engineer, you aren't just building features; you are architecting the foundational patterns that allow our entire engineering org to scale
• You will work as a technical leader within a cross-functional team of exceptional engineers, designers, and product managers to ensure our commerce engine is world-class
• 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

Benefits

• Competitive salary: We compete with top-tier tech companies for world-class talent, and we win much more frequently than we lose
• Unlimited time off: We’re a travel company. We actually mean it. Unlimited time off and an annual winter shut-down, we work hard, but we know how important it is to relax
• App Perks: Unlimited free VIP Support with every purchase on Hopper and an annual $200 USD Carrot Cash voucher to kick start your travel fund.
• Fully-remote workplace: Hopper made the decision early on in 2020 to fully embrace remote work. Since then, we have ditched our full-time offices and hired hundreds of people across every US state, Canadian province and dozens of countries around the world. We’re never going back to the old way of working.
• Coworking spaces on demand: For those who do value having a workspace out of the home, we offer optional access to coworking spaces. In some cities - Boston, London, Montreal, Paris and Toronto - we even have dedicated coworking spaces just for Hopper.
• Pre-IPO equity: Hopper gives employees the choice between stock options and restricted stock units as part of their total compensation package. When choosing stock options, employees don’t have to worry about short exercise periods if they later choose to move on. Instead we offer up to four years to exercise options after employment, depending on length of tenure.
• Evergreen equity program: We want to retain our highly valued employees. So when an employee is more than 50% of the way to vesting all of their options or RSUs, we refresh their grant. It’s as simple as that.
• Healthcare coverage: 100% healthcare cost coverage in the United States and Canada for our employees, with competitive offerings in other countries.
• Parental leave: We encourage our team members to take the time they need to transition to parenthood. In the United States and Canada, we offer top-up payments to 100% of salary for 12-18 week for primary parents and 6-10 weeks for secondary parents. In other countries, we complement national policies on parental leave with similar top-up components.
• Work from Anywhere: Our culture says to “work from anywhere,” and we mean it. Our legal team has created a program to provide visa sponsorship and immigration assistance to both new employees and existing employees who (voluntarily) wish to relocate to any of the countries we can support (eleven and counting).
• Internal career mobility program: We put a lot of effort into recruiting the best people. We also want to retain the best people. To facilitate internal career development, we created a program that lets any employee in good standing who has worked at Hopper for at least 6-12 months apply to any job opening at the company to be considered for both promotions and lateral transfers.
• A culture of performance: Adequate performance at Hopper receives a generous severance package. Inspired by Netflix, we employ the “keeper test” at scheduled intervals to ask leaders to re-assess their team members’ competencies, contributions and answer the simple question: “would you hire this person again?”. The upside of this is that we have built a dream team of top performers who also make great teammates.
• Light internal meeting culture: Not only do we not like meetings; we actively discourage them. We ask that no one starts their week with more than 25% of their calendar booked internally and have created a guide full of tips to help people avoid meeting overload.
• Severance program: Sometimes things don’t work out. Hopper offers a market-leading severance program that grants every ex-employee some severance - up to 7 months depending on length of tenure - to help mitigate the financial impact of the unexpected.