Senior Backend / Platform Engineer, Forward Deployed

Senior Backend / Platform Engineer, Forward Deployed   

Remote | Canada | Full-time 

About TravelAI

TravelAI is The Travel Memory Company. We build AI-powered travel products and infrastructure designed to make travel more efficient, more personalized, and more trustworthy. Our work sits at the intersection of AI, enterprise software, and travel, with a focus on helping the industry move forward in practical, responsible ways. We believe that through travel, the world becomes a better place.

We are launching a new AI-native platform initiative and are hiring the first core engineers for it.

About the role

We are building a governed memory platform that gives travel businesses (OTAs, TMCs, and enterprise travel programs) auditable, privacy-first AI personalization, designed for the demands of GDPR and the EU AI Act.

The initial build phase is being delivered with an external engineering partner. We are hiring two senior engineers who will work closely together and back each other up across the platform: you will work alongside the partner team for roughly your first month in a structured handover, then own the build going forward as part of a small, senior founding team working with our Founding Product Lead and directly with the CEO's AI-first product organization.

This is the forward-deployed, client-facing half of the pair. While your counterpart anchors the core platform, you will be the engineer our partners and clients work with: leading integrations, running implementations, and making sure what we build actually works in their environments. You will still build and operate core services; the two roles are designed to overlap, not silo.

What you'll do

• Help lead partnership and client integrations, from technical scoping through go-live
• Own ongoing implementation maintenance across client environments, including deployments into customer AWS accounts
• Work directly with clients to meet their needs, including data management, data onboarding, and integration with their existing systems
• Bring a user experience focus to the platform: how clients and their teams configure, operate, and trust it day to day
• Design, build, and operate core backend services alongside your platform counterpart: APIs, event processing pipelines, and data services
• Build compliance-grade capabilities into the platform: audit logging, encryption and key management, consent and data lifecycle handling
• Work closely with the Founding Product Lead to turn client and partner feedback into buildable, governed product improvements
• Help shape engineering standards, architecture, and early hiring as the team grows

Our stack

AWS-native: Aurora PostgreSQL, ECS Fargate, Lambda, API Gateway, Kinesis, ElastiCache (Redis), S3, KMS, Terraform. Services written primarily in Python and TypeScript/Node.

What we're looking for

• 7+ years building production backend systems, with significant AWS experience
• Experience in forward-deployed, solutions engineering, or client-facing implementation roles for technically complex B2B systems
• Strong communication with technical and non-technical client stakeholders; you're comfortable in the room, not just in the repo
• Experience with data migration, integration, and management across client environments
• Deep experience with event-driven architectures and relational data modelling (PostgreSQL; JSONB-heavy designs a plus)
• Comfort in compliance-sensitive domains: key management, audit logging, data retention and erasure
• A user-centred mindset: you care how the system feels to the people operating it, not just that it runs
• Senior-level ownership: you scope, build, test, deploy, and run your own services
• Strong judgment, clear communication, and comfort operating with ambiguity
• Practical, AI-native ways of working. You use AI tools and coding agents to improve how you design, build, test, and debug. If you come pre-equipped with your own suite of AI agents, please tell us more.

Especially valuable

• Experience with enterprise AI, governance, compliance, trust, privacy, observability, or control-plane style products
• Experience with identity, consent, or authorization systems
• Multi-tenant SaaS plus single-tenant deployments in customer cloud accounts
• Familiarity with SOC 2 or ISO 27001 controls and audit processes
• Ex-AWS experience, or deep experience building on AWS at scale
• Travel industry experience, especially in OTA, TMC, hotel tech, travel infrastructure, or large travel platforms

Why this role is different

This is a rare opportunity to be one of the first engineers on a new AI-centric platform initiative inside an established and profitable travel technology company. You will have meaningful architectural influence, direct ownership of the client relationships that prove the platform in market, and a real say in how the platform and the team come to life.

Location

Canada-based, fully remote. We are open on time zone as long as the candidate is based in Canada. Some travel to partner and client sites should be expected.

Compensation

• Competitive Canada-based salary in the range of C$180,000 to C$200,000 CAD
• Bonus potential
• Health and dental benefits
• Fully remote within Canada
• Canadian work authorization required at start

How to apply

Please send us your résumé or LinkedIn profile, along with a thoughtful introduction that helps us understand why this role is a strong fit for you. Tell us what specifically caught your attention, what excites you about the opportunity, and which parts of your experience would allow you to make a meaningful contribution. We are not looking for a generic cover letter. We want to hear your perspective, understand what motivates you, and see the effort and curiosity you would bring to the role. 

If you have worked on AI platforms, client integrations, governance, compliance-grade infrastructure, travel technology, or other technically complex systems, we would especially like to hear from you.