Senior Backend Developer — Lodging and Cars

About the Position

Join the Lodging and Cars Procurement team at the heart of our Lodging and Cars business unit, where you will play a crucial role in scaling a global ecosystem of hotels and cars handling a high volume of real-time transactions.

As a senior-level individual contributor, you will operate within a complex microservices environment to ensure reliable reservation processing, integrate new lodging and car partners into our central infrastructure, and optimize system monitoring. This role is ideal for an autonomous developer who excels in exploring systems and executing immediate technical work within an established and rapidly growing travel environment.

What will your day-to-day look like?

• End-to-end integrations: Perform end-to-end technical integrations with external partners (hotels, lodging, cars, and GDS) while navigating through complex communication protocols and distributed data schemas.
• Quality code: Write clean and performant code in Scala or other JVM languages to maintain, evolve, and adhere to rigorous engineering standards for our critical lodging services.
• Troubleshooting: Explore and debug complex existing codebases to delve into the infrastructure and resolve production incidents in a distributed systems environment.
• Collaboration: Work with product managers and operations teams to translate business requirements into technical tasks and estimate delivery timelines.
• Project ownership: Take full responsibility for the development lifecycle of new product features, from initial technical implementation and testing to deployment in production.
• System resilience: Contribute to the design of highly resilient and low-latency services to ensure a seamless booking experience for customers during peak loads.
• Continuous improvement: Participate in in-depth code reviews and identify opportunities to optimize scalability, performance, and overall system health.
• The ideal profile
• JVM expertise: Strong proficiency in Scala or other JVM languages, such as Java or Kotlin, with a particular emphasis on building high-throughput scalable services.
• Microservices architecture: Hands-on experience with the technical implementation, testing, and deployment of features within a microservices architecture.
• Distributed systems: Practical experience with distributed systems and service communication methods, including gRPC, Pub/Sub, and REST.
• Autonomy and agility: The ability to quickly integrate and manage technical ambiguity by exploring and executing technical plans autonomously within the existing infrastructure.
• Team spirit: Excellent communication skills and a strong "bias for action" to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams in a primarily remote-first environment.
• Business culture: A professional curiosity for the travel tech sector and a business-oriented mindset focused on delivering reliable bookings.

Benefits and perks of working with us

• Growth and capital: A well-funded and proven startup with significant ambitions, a competitive salary, and pre-IPO stock option benefits.
• Group insurance: Hopper covers 100% of group insurance premiums.
• Enhanced protection: Hopper offers life insurance coverage as well as short- and long-term disability insurance.
• Health spending account (HSA): An HSA that covers eligible medical and dental expenses.
• Telemedicine: All employees and their dependents have access to Dialogue telemedicine services, anytime and anywhere.
• Retirement savings: All employees have access to a registered retirement savings plan (RRSP) with automatic pre-tax deductions at each pay.
• Parental leave: Feel free to ask us about our very generous parental leave, well beyond industry standards!
• Unlimited vacation: An unlimited paid time off (PTO) program.
• Travel allowance: A travel allowance in Carrot Cash.
• Work flexibility: Access to a coworking space on demand via FlexDesk AND a remote work allowance.
• Company culture: An entrepreneurial culture where pushing boundaries and taking risks are part of the daily routine.
• Transparency: Open communication with the leadership and company leaders.
• Direct impact: Small, dynamic teams = massive impact.
• Learn more about Hopper

At Hopper, our mission is to become the leading global travel platform — by powering Hopper's mobile app, its website, and our B2B division, HTS ( *Hopper Technology Solutions* ). By leveraging massive amounts of data and advanced machine learning algorithms, Hopper combines its world-class travel agency offerings with exclusive fintech products to offer transparency, flexibility, and savings to travelers worldwide. We have developed several unique fintech solutions that address everything from price volatility to travel disruptions — helping people travel better and save more on their trips.

The Hopper platform serves hundreds of millions of travelers worldwide and continues to gain market share on an international scale. The Hopper app has been downloaded over 120 million times and has become extremely popular among young travelers — 70% of its users being Gen Z and millennials.

While everyone knows us as the go-to travel app for millennials and Gen Z, Hopper has evolved to be so much more. Over the past few years, we have become a travel fintech provider, a commerce platform, and a global travel agency that powers some of the world's biggest brands.

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

Some statistics that demonstrate our recent growth:

• Billions of dollars in travel and travel fintech are sold annually through Hopper and HTS channels.
• Our fintech products — including "Cancel for Any Reason" and "Flight Disruption Assistance" — show an exceptionally high customer satisfaction rate (CSAT), as terms are always clear and customers receive instant resolutions, no questions asked.
• Nearly 30% of our app customers purchase at least one fintech product during a booking; and consumers are 1.6 times more likely to repurchase if they add a fintech option to their booking than if they booked only a trip.
• Fueled by the success of its fintech products, Hopper launched a B2B initiative, HTS (Hopper Technology Solutions), which today represents over 75% of the company's activities.
• Through HTS, any travel supplier (airlines, hotels, banks, travel agencies, etc.) can seamlessly integrate and distribute Hopper's fintech or travel inventory on their direct channels. As part of its first HTS partnership, the company partnered with Capital One to co-develop Capital One Travel, a new travel portal specifically designed for cardholders. Other HTS partners include Air Canada, Uber, CommBank, Nubank, Flair Airlines, and many more.
• Hopper was named the number 1 most innovative company in the travel sector by Fast Company. Hopper has been downloaded over 120 million times and continues to record millions of new installs each month. Hopper is now the 3rd largest online travel agency in North America, and 70% of our customers are