Senior Backend / Platform Engineer

Senior Backend / Platform Engineer

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 to take ownership of 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 AI-first product organization.

You will not be stepping into a mature codebase with a fixed org chart around it. You will take over an early-stage platform, harden it, and help create the engineering culture around it.

What you'll do

• Take ownership of a modern, AWS-native platform from an external partner and drive it forward
• Design, build, and operate core backend services: 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
• Own deployment automation across multiple environments, including deployments into customer AWS accounts
• Build the testing and acceptance tooling that gates releases
• Work closely with the Director and Product Lead to turn product requirements into buildable, governed systems
• 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 building and shipping enterprise software, platform products, infrastructure products, or technically complex B2B systems
• Deep experience with event-driven architectures and relational data modelling (PostgreSQL; JSONB-heavy designs a plus)
• Ownership of infrastructure as code (Terraform or similar) and multi-environment deployment automation
• Comfort in compliance-sensitive domains: key management, audit logging, data retention and erasure
• A track record of taking over, hardening, and operating systems you did not originally write
• 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
• 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 systems that customers will audit and regulators will scrutinise, and a real say in how the platform and the team come to life.

Location

Canada-based, fully remote. We are open on time zones as long as the candidate is based in Canada.

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

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, governance, compliance-grade infrastructure, travel technology, or other technically complex systems, we would especially like to hear from you.