Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer (Backend / API Platform) Location: New York City (4 days Hybrid) Pay: $190,000 - $240,000 Base + Equity No Sponsorship Offered About the Opportunity The organization is scaling its platform and seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead the design and development of a mission-critical external API used by partners, third-party distributors, and emerging AI-driven booking channels. This is a highly impactful individual contributor role focused on transactional systems, inventory management, external integrations, API architecture, reliability, and platform scalability. Responsibilities Design, build, and launch a versioned external API supporting pricing, availability, reservations, modifications, and cancellations. Develop resilient booking workflows that handle retries, idempotency, reconciliation, timeouts, duplicate requests, and partial failures. Own and evolve core booking domain models including inventory, pricing, scheduling, holds, carts, and bookings. Design scalable integration patterns for third-party systems, booking partners, POS, and property-management platforms. Build extensible platform capabilities that support multiple product categories without requiring separate booking systems. Establish observability, monitoring, testing, alerting, and operational best practices for critical booking services. Collaborate with engineering, product, and business stakeholders to translate complex requirements into durable platform solutions. Must-Have Qualifications 8+ years of software engineering experience building backend or distributed systems. Experience designing transactional systems, public APIs, integration platforms, or reservation/commerce platforms. Strong understanding of relational databases, concurrency, consistency models, asynchronous workflows, and distributed systems failures. Experience evolving production data models and operating high-availability systems at scale. Hands-on experience with modern backend technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Node.js, PostgreSQL, REST APIs, and cloud infrastructure. (language-agnostic) Strong focus on system reliability, testing, observability, monitoring, and production ownership.