Software Engineer - Flights

About the jobJoin the core Flights Platform team at Hopper, where your contributions will directly impact a high-growth, global travel ecosystem that handles millions of users and high-volume, real-time transactions daily.This role offers significant feature ownership and a chance to deep-dive into the technical complexities of the airline industry. You will be instrumental in developing and evolving the mission-critical systems that power Hopper’s core flight booking engine.Your work will be highly visible and directly responsible for:Driving Core Feature Delivery: Taking ownership of major feature releases across the entire flight booking funnel—from flight search to booking creation and post-booking fulfillment.Impacting Global Reach: Building scalable services that integrate new airline partners and support our B2B distribution network, enabling Hopper’s growth worldwide.System Reliability: Contributing directly to the design and implementation of highly resilient, low-latency services that ensure a trustworthy and seamless experience for customers under high load.What You Will Lead and Build:You will be embedded within a cross-functional team, making substantial code contributions to a complex, high-throughput microservices environment. Key areas of contribution include:End-to-End Feature Development: Designing, implementing, and deploying high-quality code for new flight product features, taking them from concept to production.System Enhancement: Participating actively in discussions around system design, identifying opportunities to improve service scalability, performance, and monitoring (SLOs/SLAs).Integration Projects: Leading the technical implementation of new integrations with external airline and GDS partners, navigating complex communication protocols and data schemas.Code Quality and Mentorship: Upholding high standards for code quality through thorough code reviews, mentoring more junior engineers on best practices, and driving engineering excellence.What would your day-to-day look like:Implementation and Review: Writing clean, performant code, contributing significantly to the codebase, and performing code reviews to maintain quality and share knowledge.Technical Problem Solving: Collaborating with senior engineers to troubleshoot, debug, and resolve challenging production issues in a distributed system.Requirements Planning: Partnering with Product Managers and Product Operations to understand business requirements, decompose features into technical tasks, and estimate delivery timelines.System Exploration: Deeply exploring and improving the existing codebase and contributing to engineering improvements for the core flights product.An ideal candidate has:We are seeking engineers who are eager to own major features and grow their impact within a complex domain. An ideal candidate possesses:Feature Ownership Track Record: A working history of owning the technical implementation, testing, and deployment of features throughout the development life cycle.System Contribution: Experience working on and contributing to the design of highly available microservices in a production environment.Language Proficiency: Strong proficiency in Scala or other JVM languages, such as Java/Kotlin.Distributed Systems Experience: Familiarity with various service communication methods, including gRPC, Pub/Sub, and REST, and practical experience working in a distributed environment.Collaboration and Communication: Excellent communication skills, demonstrating an ability to effectively collaborate with developers, product managers, and operations teams to achieve feature goals.Perks and benefits of working with us:Well-funded and proven startup with large ambitions, competitive salary and the upsides of pre-IPO equity packages.Hopper offers employees enrollment to a Hopper sponsored Health Collective that includes options for basic medical and dental insurances, as well as options for deductibles.Hopper offers private insurance covera ... (truncated, view full listing at source)