Staff Backend Software Engineer - Commerce Foundations (100% Remote - Canada)

About the Job

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.

The Impact You’ll Make

• 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.

Our Tech Stack

• Backend & Distributed Systems: Our core services are written in Scala, leveraging functional programming patterns to maintain high concurrency, type safety, and reliability across our global commerce engine.

• Cloud Infrastructure: We are native to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), utilizing a suite of managed services (including GKE, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Spanner) to power a resilient, multi-tenant architecture.

• Frontend Foundations: Our partner-facing portals are built with React and TypeScript, requiring clean, well-documented API contracts and full-stack solutions that enable seamless integration.

What Your Day-to-Day Will Look Like

• 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.

An Ideal Candidate Has

• 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.

Perks and benefits of working with us:

• Well-funded and proven startup with large ambitions, competitive salary and upsides of pre-IPO equity packages.

• Hopper covers 100% of the premiums for group insurance plan.

• Hopper offers life, short term and long term disability coverage.

• HSA that covers eligible medical and dental expenses.

• All employees and dependents have access to Dialogue’s telemedicine services, anytime, anywhere.

• All employees have access to an RRSP plan with automatic pre-tax withdrawals per pay.

• Please ask us about our very generous parental leave, much above industry standards!.

• Unlimited PTO.

• Carrot Cash travel stipend.

• Access to co-working space on demand through FlexDesk AND Work-from-home stipend.

• Entrepreneurial culture where pushing limits and taking risks is everyday business.

• Open communication with management and company leadership.

• Small, dynamic teams = massive impact.

• More about Hopper

At Hopper, we are on a mission to become the leading travel platform globally – powering Hopper’s mobile app, website and our B2B business, HTS (Hopper Technology Solutions). By leveraging massive amounts of data and advanced machine learning algorithms, Hopper combines its world-class travel agency offering with proprietary fintech products to bring transparency, flexibility and savings to travelers globally. We have developed several unique fintech solutions that address everything from pricing volatility to trip disruptions – helping people travel better and save more on their trips.

The Hopper platform serves hundreds of millions of travelers globally and continues to capture market share around the world. he Hopper app has been downloaded over 120 million times and has become largely popular among younger travelers – with 70% of its users being Gen Z and millennials.

While everyone knows us as the Gen Z and Millennial travel app, Hopper has evolved to become much more than that. In recent years, we’ve grown into a travel fintech provider, commerce platform, and global travel agency that powers some of the world’s largest brands.

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

Here are just a few stats that demonstrate the company’s recent growth:

Billions of dollars worth of travel and travel fintech are sold through Hopper and HTS’ channels every year.

Our fintech products – including Cancel for Any Reason and Flight Disruption Assistance – have exceptionally strong CSAT because the terms are always clear, and customers receive instant, no-questions-asked resolutions.

Almost 30% of our app customers purchase at least one fintech product when making a booking; and consumers are 1.6x more likely to repurchase if they add fintech to their booking vs if they booked just travel.

Given the success of its fintech products, Hopper launched a B2B initiative, HTS (Hopper Technology Solutions), which represents more than 75% of the business.

Through HTS, any travel provider (airlines, hotels, banks, travel agencies, etc.) can integrate and seamlessly distribute Hopper’s fintech or travel inventory on their direct channels. As its first HTS partnership, the company partnered with Capital One to co-develop Capital One Travel, a new travel portal designed specifically for cardholders. Other HTS partners include Air Canada, Uber, CommBank, Nubank, Flair Airlines and many more.

Hopper has been named the #1 most innovative company in travel by Fast Company Hopper has been downloaded over 120 million times and continues to have millions of new installs each month. Hopper is now the #3 largest online travel agencies in North America and 70% of our app customers are Gen-Z and millennials travelers.

Hopper has raised over $750 million USD of private capital and is backed by some of the largest institutional investors and banks in the world. HTS is primed to continue its growth as the leading travel ecommerce provider in a $1 trillion online shopping category. The Hopper app and website will also continue to be the preferred travel provider for Gen Z and Millennials..

Come take off with us!
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