Senior Backend Engineer, Booking Platform - 100% Remote - EMEA

NOTE: This is a FULLY remote role, but the candidate must be within EMEA to collaborate with their team, peers, and internal customers. You do not have to be in the specific country or city shown in this listing, but please only apply if you are physically based within EMEA.

Trusted by 20,000+ property managers worldwide, Hostaway is an industry leading, AI-powered vacation rental management platform designed for professional short-term rental operators. Hostaway brings everything together for greater efficiency and faster growth.

Profitable, high-growth, and the first short-term rental property management software unicorn 🦄. Join us at our most exciting stage yet! Learn more about our recent valuation and story here.

About the role

We're looking for an impact-focused Senior Backend Engineer to join Bookineers, the team that owns Hostaway's guest-facing services: the guest portal and the direct sales site builder. These products are how our customers' guests discover, book, and interact with their stays — they're public-facing, high-traffic, and directly tied to our customers' revenue.

You'll work on services that need to be fast, reliable, and scalable. A big part of our current focus is extracting existing services out of the monolith to give us the autonomy, performance, and resilience these guest-facing flows require. In parallel, we're starting to expose our domain through APIs designed for agentic interfaces — opening up new ways for guests and partners to interact with Hostaway. You'll have a real impact on the architecture, the roadmap, and how the team operates.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and operate backend services in PHP and Go that power the guest portal and direct sales site builder.

• Drive the extraction of services out of our monolith, defining clean boundaries, ownership, and migration paths.

• Collaborate closely with Product and Design to shape and ship features that move the needle for direct bookings.

• Design and ship APIs built for agentic interfaces — making our guest-facing domain consumable by AI agents and automated workflows.

• Improve page speed and end-to-end performance, working closely with frontend peers since conversion depends on it.

• Contribute to high-level architectural decisions and help us move quickly without accumulating regret.

• Leverage AI to accelerate code delivery — we provide a Claude Team Premium subscription and expect engineers to use it well.

• 6+ years of experience as a Backend Engineer, with a strong foundation in software engineering

• Strong experience with PHP in production, and experience with Go (or strong interest and ability to ramp up quickly)

• Proven experience designing and operating high-traffic, customer-facing systems

• Experience decomposing monoliths or extracting services, with a pragmatic view on when to do it (and when not to)

• Solid experience designing APIs — REST, GraphQL, or similar — with an eye on clarity, versioning, and consumability (bonus if you've built APIs for AI agents or LLM-driven clients)

• Comfortable using AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.) as part of your daily workflow, and able to get real leverage out of them

• Proven experience in product-oriented engineering teams, ideally within SaaS

• Familiarity with Node.js and React is a plus

What success looks like

• The guest portal and direct sales site builder are fast, reliable, and scalable — guests get a smooth experience and our customers see it in their conversion numbers.

• Services are progressively extracted from the monolith with clear ownership and minimal disruption to delivery.

• Performance (page speed, latency, uptime) becomes a measurable strength of the products Bookineers owns.

• Our domain is accessible through clean, well-designed APIs that agentic clients can consume reliably.

• The team gets real productivity gains from AI-assisted development, without sacrificing code quality or ownership.

• Cross-functional collaboration with Product and Design runs smoothly, with engineering contributing meaningfully to product direction.

What we offer

• Competitive Compensation: We offer competitive pay based on market rates in the country of the applicant.

• 100% Remote: Enjoy the freedom to work from anywhere within your country of residence—be it a co-working space, your home office, or even your dining room table. The choice is yours. Just don’t ask to work in our office (we don’t have one).

• Equity: Every role in our company comes with valuable stock options in a fast-growing and profitable company. This ensures we all share in the company’s success.

• Values-Driven Leadership: Our Core Values are not just words we’ve written to make us feel good. We leverage them daily when making strategic and tactical decisions.

• Professional Growth: Our rapid growth offers unparalleled learning and development opportunities, along with a multitude of career advancement opportunities.

• Annual Paid Leave: The specific amounts vary by country and are aligned with country and/or contract-specific norms.

• Geographic Specific Benefits: As an international employer, we offer different country-specific benefits such as Health Insurance and Pensions in countries where these perks are customary. The specifics depend on the country of the applicant.

• Dynamic Team Culture: As a global company with team members in over 40 countries, our diverse and international culture fuels our innovation and creativity, providing a key pillar to our success (and making it a lot of fun to work here).

Thank you for your interest. If you apply for this role, you will receive an email from our Talent Acquisition team after your application has been reviewed alongside the qualifications for this role and the qualifications of others who have applied.