Senior Backend Engineer

Role Description

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Booking Engine squad, you'll implement new architectures, features, and best practices to scale the Cloudbeds platform, contributing to our ongoing move toward a service-oriented architecture using modern SaaS and AWS technologies across the stack. You'll work on systems where correctness, latency, and resilience under load are core to the job, not afterthoughts. Your goal is to deliver an exceptional experience to customers around the world, with quality, performance, and scalability top of mind.

This role is part of the Booking Engine Squad, the team behind the guest-facing reservation experience that powers direct bookings for tens of thousands of Cloudbeds properties worldwide. Direct bookings are one of the most valuable channels we can win for a property, and we're constantly building new and innovative ways to help them capture that demand, from richer customization to entirely new booking experiences. It sits on the revenue-critical path, so speed, reliability, and getting the details right directly shape whether a guest completes a booking.

• Design and implement features and improvements in PHP
• Design and build the APIs and integrations the booking flow depends on
• Model and evolve the data behind availability, pricing, and reservations
• Own the performance, scalability, and reliability of our services at scale
• Contribute to the ongoing initiative to migrate our core platform into microservices and event-driven services
• Lead discussions on complex technical concepts and requirements with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Drive technical decisions and contribute to the backend architecture group
• Write clean, well-tested, well-documented, and elegant code
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to plan, build, and ship high-quality features
• Mentor team members through pair programming and code reviews
• Re-architect and refactor existing systems
• Help design the long-term vision for our technology and component architectures
• Advocate for engineering best practices, quality, and test automation across our code and processes

Qualifications

• 5+ years of PHP web application software engineering experience
• Expert knowledge of relational databases, indexing, and searching technologies
• Experience with API-driven design and development
• Good product sense and empathy for our customers
• Solid Git fundamentals, including workflows and actions
• Strong knowledge of and a passion for software best practices, design patterns, and testing
• Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills
• Strong communication, teamwork, and collaboration skills
• Passionate about agile practices and continuous improvement
• Business-level English fluency, verbal and written
• Experience identifying and improving application performance

Requirements

• Experience with PHP frameworks (Laravel or Symfony)
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes, AWS)
• Experience designing and building microservices
• Experience working with AI coding tools like Claude Code
• Experience working with a remote-first, globally distributed team
• Experience with Jira, Confluence, and GitHub
• Travel industry experience (a plus, but definitely not required!)

Benefits

• Remote First, Remote Always
• PTO in accordance with local labor requirements
• Monthly Wellness Fridays - enjoy an extra-long weekend every month
• Fully Paid Parental Leave
• Home office stipend based on country of residency
• Professional development courses in Cloudbeds University
• Access to professional development, including manager training, upskilling and knowledge transfer