Senior Software Engineer, Backend — Booking Platform & APIs (Booking APIs & Transactional Systems) Compensation: $190,000–$210,000 base plus equity Location: New York City — four days per week in office The Company A category-leading hospitality technology marketplace is building the infrastructure that allows premium hotel experiences to be discovered and booked beyond the traditional overnight stay. With established product-market fit and an expanding engineering organization, the company is investing heavily in the platform needed to support new markets, products, and distribution channels. The Opportunity This is a senior hands-on role owning one of the company's most strategically important backend initiatives: the API layer connecting live inventory with external distribution platforms and booking agents. You will have significant technical authority, company-level visibility, and the opportunity to grow toward Staff through demonstrated impact. The Role You will lead the design and development of external booking APIs while solving difficult problems around transactional correctness, integrations, inventory, and domain modeling. The role combines deep backend engineering with direct product and commercial impact rather than isolating you within a narrow subsystem. What You’ll Do • Build and own external APIs supporting pricing, holds, bookings, modifications, cancellations, and live inventory. • Design reliable transactional workflows across bookings, payments, orders, reservations, and inventory. • Develop robust domain and relational data models that can support increasingly varied products and booking rules. • Partner with senior technical leadership on foundational architecture and long-term platform decisions. • Create reusable integration patterns that enable other engineers to build partner connectors efficiently and consistently. • Own systems through design, implementation, testing, observability, deployment, and production performance. What You’ll Bring • 6+ years of hands-on backend or platform engineering experience. • Experience personally designing and shipping significant production systems rather than operating purely as an architect or manager. • Strong exposure to correctness-sensitive transactional systems such as booking, payments, orders, reservations, inventory, ticketing, or similar domains. • Strong API design, domain-modeling, or relational data-modeling experience, ideally across several of these areas. • Excellent computer science and software-engineering fundamentals, with the judgment to make sound architectural trade-offs. • A high-ownership, product-aware approach and the ability to work effectively with engineering, product, and business stakeholders. What This Role Requires • 6+ years of relevant backend or platform engineering experience. • Proven hands-on ownership of a correctness-critical transactional production system. • A desire to remain an individual contributor and write production code rather than move into pure management or architecture. • Ability to work from the New York City office four days per week; visa sponsorship is generally not available. Why Join • Own a technically difficult, company-level platform that directly enables the next phase of business growth. • Stay deeply hands-on while taking on broader architectural ownership and building toward Staff-level scope. • Join while the engineering organization is still lean enough for individual engineers to materially influence systems, product decisions, hiring, and engineering culture. About People in AI People in AI is a specialist recruitment partner connecting exceptional AI, machine learning, data, and engineering talent with some of the most ambitious technology companies in the world. We work closely with founders, technical leaders, and hiring teams to represent opportunities accurately and help candidates assess genuine fit.