Staff Software Engineer

At AmaWaterways, we believe meaningful careers begin with purpose, passion and a shared commitment to delivering unforgettable experiences. For those who value curiosity, connection and personal enrichment, AmaWaterways offers the opportunity to help craft meaningful river journeys that invite travelers to follow their own current. Built on a foundation of heartfelt hospitality, we treat our guests—and each other—with genuine care, warmth and respect. AmaWaterways fosters a collaborative environment both onboard our ships and across our global network of offices, where team members grow together, support one another and take pride in upholding the high standards and thoughtful service our company is known for.

We invite talented, motivated professionals to explore our career opportunities and begin their journey with AmaWaterways today.

SUMMARY

This position provides senior technical leadership across the full stack of AmaWaterways' consumer and partner digital products, from inception through implementation and ongoing maintenance. The Staff Software Engineer sets technical direction within an application engineering scrum team, owns the technical backlog, and drives the design, development, and delivery of scalable, secure, and high-performing frontend and backend solutions. Working across the Next.js/React consumer platform and the .NET services backbone (Inventory Service, Leads pipeline, identity/auth, and supporting APIs), this role combines deep hands-on engineering with technical mentorship and cross-team coordination. The role serves as a technical lead within one of the Application Engineering teams; specific team assignment will be determined based on portfolio needs at time of hire.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Serve as the technical lead for an application engineering scrum team, owning the technical backlog, providing technical sign-off, and acting as the go-to for technical decisions.
• Drive the architecture, design, development, testing, and deployment of full-stack solutions across the consumer website (Next.js/React) and the backend services platform (.NET, GraphQL/REST APIs).
• Design and build scalable, secure, high-performance services and user-facing experiences, taking ownership of components critical to the organization's mission and core business operations.
• Translate business and product requirements into sound technical designs, clearly communicating scope, effort, risk, and trade-offs to engineering and product stakeholders.
• Lead technical design reviews and produce technical design documentation (TDDs), architecture diagrams, and decision records for new features and system improvements.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards for code quality, security, performance, accessibility, observability, and incident response across owned applications.
• Integrate frontend applications with backend systems and external data sources through RESTful and GraphQL APIs, with attention to caching, error handling, and secure data flows.
• Optimize applications for speed, scalability, and performance, including Core Web Vitals on the front end and low-latency read paths on the back end.
• Provide effort estimations and delivery commitments in support of PMO roadmap planning and sprint execution.
• Conduct and lead code reviews, enforce branching and pull-request workflows, and uphold the team's Definition of Ready and Definition of Done tied to CI/CD gates.
• Mentor senior and junior engineers, providing guidance on coding standards, architectural patterns, and full-stack best practices.
• Perform root-cause analysis, troubleshooting, and escalation for production issues and incidents; participate in on-call rotation as required.
• Partner with QA, UX/UI, Product, and Platform Engineering to deliver iterative, high-quality releases in an Agile/Scrum environment.
• Champion automation and modern solutions, including the appropriate use of AI coding tools and AI-enabled capabilities, where they improve quality and velocity.
• Stay current with emerging web frameworks, backend technologies, identity patterns, security standards, and development tools, and evaluate their applicability to AmaWaterways.
• Performs other related duties as assigned by management.

SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITIES

This job carries out technical leadership responsibilities in accordance with the organization's policies and applicable laws. This is a senior individual-contributor role with technical-lead responsibilities rather than direct people-management authority:

• Providing day-to-day technical direction, guidance, and mentorship to engineers on the team.
• Owning the technical backlog and providing technical sign-off on work delivered by the team.
• Assisting with interviewing and evaluating candidates for engineering roles when needed.
• Supporting the onboarding and training process to ensure adherence to development standards and best practices.
• Coordinating technical work across the team, monitoring progress, and helping ensure timely delivery.
• Contributing input to performance discussions by offering feedback on technical productivity and professional development.
• Helping to address minor project-related concerns and escalating issues to the Director when appropriate.

   QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor's Degree (BA/BS) from a four-year college or university in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Computer skills required: Contact Management Systems; Development Software; Inventory Software; Microsoft Office Suite; Project Management Software, Database Software, Design Software, Internet Software, Spreadsheet Software, Word Processing Software, Electronic Mail Software, Presentation Software, Reservation Software, Phone Software.
• Other skills required:
  • Eight or more years of professional software engineering experience, including demonstrated technical leadership of teams or major workstreams.
  • Proven full-stack expertise spanning a modern frontend stack (React.js, Next.js, TypeScript) and backend services (.NET / C# and/or Node.js), including RESTful and GraphQL API design.
  • Strong experience with Server-Side Rendering (SSR), Static Site Generation (SSG), and modern frontend performance optimization, including Core Web Vitals.
  • Deep experience designing and building scalable backend services and APIs supporting booking, inventory, pricing, lead capture, and guest-experience use cases.
  • Hands-on experience with headless/visual CMS platforms (Builder.io or equivalent such as Contentful or Sanity) and composable web architectures.
  • Strong experience with relational database design and development (SQL Server, PostgreSQL) and familiarity with NoSQL/data-layer and caching patterns (e.g., Redis).
  • Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (preferably Microsoft Azure), including app hosting, API management, messaging/service bus, storage, networking, and security concepts.
  • Experience designing, building, and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, or similar, across multiple environments (Dev, UAT, Prod).
  • Experience integrating identity and access management using Auth0 or equivalent (OIDC/OAuth2, SSO, JWT) across modern guest account and consent patterns.
  • Strong understanding of secure coding practices and application security principles (OWASP Top 10, SAST/DAST, secrets management) and PCI considerations for consumer-facing booking and payment flows.
  • Experience with observability tooling (Dash0, Datadog, New Relic, or equivalent), application logging, telemetry, and alerting.
  • Skilled using Git and GitHub for version control, including branching strategies, code reviews, and pull-request workflows.
  • Experience leading Agile/Scrum delivery, including estimation, sprint planning, and Definition of Done tied to CI/CD gates.
  • Experience evaluating and applying AI-enabled development tools and solutions where appropriate.
  • Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate technical concepts for engineering, product, and business audiences.
  • Hospitality, travel, cruise, or e-commerce experience are strongly preferred.

COMPETENCIES

• Collaboration & Teamwork - Partners effectively across teams and functions; values diverse viewpoints; build trust; advances shared goals and collective success.
• Leadership & Influence - Inspires and motivates others; communicates in a clear direction; provides meaningful feedback and recognition; leads with confidence, empathy, and accountability.
• Diversity - Shows respect and sensitivity for cultural differences; Promotes a harassment-free environment.
• Analytical - Synthesizes complex or diverse information; Collects and researches data; Uses intuition and experience to complement data; Designs workflows and procedures.
• Customer Service - Manages difficult or emotional customer situations; Responds promptly to customer needs; Solicits customer feedback to improve service; Responds to requests for service and assistance; Meets commitments.
• Design - Generates creative solutions; Uses feedback to modify designs; Applies design principles; Demonstrates attention to detail.
• Initiative - Volunteers readily; Undertakes self-development activities; Seeks increased responsibilities; Takes independent actions and calculated risks; Looks for and takes advantage of opportunities; Asks for and offers help when needed.

PHYSICAL DEMANDS AND WORK ENVIRONMENT

• Occasionally required to stand
• Occasionally required to walk
• Continually required to sit
• Continually required to utilize hand and finger dexterity
• Occasionally required to climb, balance, bend, stoop, kneel or crawl
• Frequently required to talk or hear
• While performing the duties of this job, the noise level in the work environment is usually moderate
• The employee must occasionally lift and/or move up to 10 pounds
• Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision