Sr. Backend Engineer

DRH Search • New York, NY

10d • Hybrid

About The Position

We're assisting an established Series B startup with their search for a sr. backend engineer to build their external booking API from scratch. Their product allows customers to access luxury hotel amenities for the day without having to book a room.

Requirements

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, or a track record of equivalent impact.
• Designed transactional systems, built external APIs or integration platforms, and safely evolved data models in production.
• Understand relational modeling, concurrency, consistency, asynchronous workflows, and distributed failures.
• Turn complex business rules into clear boundaries, lifecycle states, contracts, and invariants.
• Lead an important system as its primary builder while collaborating on foundational decisions.
• Care about correctness, testing, observability, and safe rollouts.
• Communicate directly, listen well, and improve the work of engineers around you.

Nice To Haves

• Ruby on Rails experience
• Experience with marketplaces, reservations, inventory-constrained commerce, public APIs, or third-party booking systems

Responsibilities

• Design and build the external booking API for distribution partners (availability, pricing, reservation, modification, cancellation).
• Own correctness-critical transaction flows - ensure booking, payment, and inventory operations are atomic, idempotent, and resilient under concurrent load.
• Define API contracts (versioning, authentication, rate limiting, error handling) for external partner consumption.
• Partner with product and business teams on partner integration requirements and launch timelines.
• Instrument services for observability (Datadog) - latency, error rates, throughput, and business-critical alerts.
• Contribute to platform reliability (Redis caching, Kafka event streaming, OpenSearch indexing) across the booking domain.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed