Senior Backend Engineer

About

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.

Profitable, high-growth, and the first short-term rental property management software unicorn. Join us at our most exciting stage yet!

About the role

We're looking for an impact-focused Senior Backend Engineer to join Bookineers, the team that owns Hostaway's guest-facing services: the guest portal and the direct sales site builder. These products are how our customers' guests discover, book, and interact with their stays — they're public-facing, high-traffic, and directly tied to our customers' revenue.

You'll work on services that need to be fast, reliable, and scalable. A big part of our current focus is extracting existing services out of the monolith to give us the autonomy, performance, and resilience these guest-facing flows require. In parallel, we're starting to expose our domain through APIs designed for agentic interfaces — opening up new ways for guests and partners to interact with Hostaway. You'll have a real impact on the architecture, the roadmap, and how the team operates.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and operate backend services in PHP and Go that power the guest portal and direct sales site builder.
• Drive the extraction of services out of our monolith, defining clean boundaries, ownership, and migration paths.
• Collaborate closely with Product and Design to shape and ship features that move the needle for direct bookings.
• Design and ship APIs built for agentic interfaces — making our guest-facing domain consumable by AI agents and automated workflows.
• Improve page speed and end-to-end performance, working closely with frontend peers since conversion depends on it.
• Contribute to high-level architectural decisions and help us move quickly without accumulating regret.
• Leverage AI to accelerate code delivery — we provide a Claude Team Premium subscription and expect engineers to use it well.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience as a Backend Engineer, with a strong foundation in software engineering.
• Strong experience with PHP in production, and experience with Go (or strong interest and ability to ramp up quickly).
• Proven experience designing and operating high-traffic, customer-facing systems.
• Experience decomposing monoliths or extracting services, with a pragmatic view on when to do it (and when not to).
• Solid experience designing APIs — REST, GraphQL, or similar — with an eye on clarity, versioning, and consumability (bonus if you've built APIs for AI agents or LLM-driven clients).
• Comfortable using AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.) as part of your daily workflow, and able to get real leverage out of them.
• Proven experience in product-oriented engineering teams, ideally within SaaS.
• Familiarity with Node.js and React is a plus.

What success looks like

• The guest portal and direct sales site builder are fast, reliable, and scalable — guests get a smooth experience and our customers see it in their conversion numbers.
• Services are progressively extracted from the monolith with clear ownership and minimal disruption to delivery.
• Performance (page speed, latency, uptime) becomes a measurable strength of the products Bookineers owns.
• Our domain is accessible through clean, well-designed APIs that agentic clients can consume reliably.
• The team gets real productivity gains from AI-assisted development, without sacrificing code quality or ownership.
• Cross-functional collaboration with Product and Design runs smoothly, with engineering contributing meaningfully to product direction.

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. Just don’t ask to work in our office (we don’t have one).
• Equity: Every role in our company comes with valuable stock options in a fast-growing and profitable company. This ensures we all share in the company’s success.
• 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. The specifics depend on the country of the applicant.
• 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 (and making it a lot of fun to work here).