Backend Staff Software Engineer in New York

• Transactional correctness: Personally built systems involving bookings, payments, orders, reservations, or inventory, where duplicate transactions or inconsistent data have real consequences.
• APIs and data modeling: Designed APIs or integration platforms that others depend on, modeled complex business rules, and safely evolved production systems.
• Staff-level impact: Set technical direction across multiple engineers or teams, aligned people on difficult decisions, and created patterns that others adopted.
• The Staff bar: They can explain what they personally decided and built, how they enabled other engineers to deliver, and what improved in production.

Performance Objectives / What you’ll be doing:

• Build and launch the external booking API. Define stable, versioned contracts for live pricing, availability, holds, booking creation, changes, and cancellations.
• Make booking operations safe under real failures. Design idempotency, recovery, webhooks, and reconciliation for retries, timeouts, duplicates, and partial success.
• Evolve the core booking domain. Create clear models and invariants for products, schedules, prices, inventory, holds, carts, and bookings.
• Make the platform extensible. Prove that a new category such as events or food and beverage can use the shared booking model instead of requiring a separate system.
• Own the architecture for supply, PMS, and POS integrations. Create reusable connector patterns so other engineers can add partners without reinventing failure handling and reconciliation.
• Define the data contracts that keep inventory discoverable through OpenSearch. Search is supporting technology for this role, not its primary ownership area.
• Operate what you build. Set reliability and latency targets, and add the tests, metrics, dashboards, alerts, tracing, and runbooks needed for a critical booking path.
• Turn partner needs into durable platform capabilities, explain tradeoffs clearly, and raise the engineering bar through practical reviews and mentoring.

• A hands-on backend engineer, typically with 8+ years of experience or equivalent impact, who has led important production systems from design through launch and operation.
• Source Staff, Principal, Lead, and strong Senior engineers. Look for evidence of