Staff Engineer, Backend

The role

You will drive architectural excellence and technical strategy across multiple product engineering pods. You will design low-latency systems for dynamic pricing, inventory data processing, and vendor ecosystem management.

What you will do

• Drive architectural excellence and technical strategy across multiple product engineering pods
• Design low-latency systems for dynamic pricing strategies
• Process large-scale inventory data across tens of thousands of products
• Manage vendor ecosystem coordination
• Partner with Engineering Managers to eliminate technical debt
• Improve deployment stability
• Build resilient system boundaries
• Elevate engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, and mentorship

Required qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience
• 5+ years in backend systems and distributed architectures
• Prior experience mentoring engineers
• Prior experience driving technical initiatives across organizational boundaries without direct authority
• Deep expertise in Spring Boot, Kotlin, and Java
• Strong foundation in distributed systems concepts (eventual consistency, scalability, fault tolerance, high availability, CAP theorem trade-offs)
• Hands-on experience with Kafka or similar event-driven architectures
• Hands-on experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MariaDB)
• Hands-on experience with NoSQL systems (MongoDB)
• Hands-on experience with Redis for caching
• Hands-on experience with AWS cloud infrastructure
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to engineers and non-technical stakeholders

About the company

Headout is a fast-growing marketplace in the travel industry with $200M+ in revenue. The company's mission is to be the easiest, fastest, and most delightful way to head out to real-life experiences.