Senior Backend Engineer

Job description

**About Vogo** [Vogo](https://www.vogo.com/) is a global travel platform that brings all types of accommodations into one place, making it easy for travelers to find the perfect stay. From downtown hotels and luxury resorts to private vacation rentals and remote cabins, Vogo offers the widest selection of accommodations worldwide. Vogo's proprietary technology then scans billions of data points to surface the best deals across millions of properties, streamlining discovery, and booking for every traveler. Since launching out of [Wilbur Labs](https://www.wilburlabs.com/) in 2018, Vogo has rapidly become one of the most trusted travel platforms globally, surpassing $1 billion in gross bookings in just two years. Vogo is headquartered in Dallas and led by a team of travel industry veterans. **About this Role** Vogo is seeking a versatile, highly skilled **Senior Backend Engineer** to join our engineering organization. In this role, you’ll help ensure high performance, reliability, and scalability, and contribute to the architecture and direction of our systems. Our backend systems are the backbone of the traveler experience, and this role plays a critical part in scaling our platform to support millions of users and high-volume transactions. The ideal candidate will own key backend initiatives and help shape engineering culture, collaborating closely with product, engineering, and leadership to build the services and APIs that power our platform. This role will report directly to the Head of Engineering. This is a full-time hybrid position, based in Dallas. ### Role & Responsibilities: - Design, architect, and implement robust APIs and services using Node.js, PostgreSQL, and Redis - Optimize complex SQL queries and schemas to ensure lightning-fast performance across large datasets - Leverage AI coding tools (Claude, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, etc.) as a core part of your development workflow, and contribute to integrating AI/LLM-powered features into our platform - Tackle high-scale engineering challenges to ensure reliability and efficiency under heavy traffic - Collaborate cross-functionally with product, engineering, and leadership teams on backend features - Proactively identify and resolve technical debt; lead refactoring projects to future-proof our stack - Participate in team standups, code reviews, and deployment processes - Mentor and support other engineers, helping to elevate team-wide technical excellence - Take ownership of projects and drive initiatives from concept to production - Help lead releases and share ownership of release readiness alongside other senior engineers - Mentor and support engineers across the team while helping establish and maintain technical standards and best practices - Act as a technical point of contact for your area, proactively flagging risks and pushing back on scope when something doesn't fit our stack ### Minimum Qualifications: - 8+ years of backend software engineering experience - Strong experience with Node.js and PostgreSQL (or equivalent relational databases) - Strong SQL skills - able to write, debug, and optimize complex queries on large datasets - Demonstrated AI fluency — actively uses AI tools in day-to-day engineering work - Experience working on high-volume, consumer-facing platforms - Solid understanding of backend architecture, distributed systems, and scalability principles - Experience with DevOps practices and cloud infrastructure (preferably Google Cloud or AWS), including CI/CD, monitoring, and infrastructure as code - Entrepreneurial mindset with a self-driven, ownership mentality - Excellent collaboration and communication skills ### Preferred Qualifications & Prior Experience: - Experience in the travel, marketplace, or e-commerce space - Experience scaling systems to millions of daily users - Experience building and deploying machine learning models using Vertex AI or similar platforms (e.g., SageMaker, Azure ML) - Experience with React and Next.js - Contributions to open-source projects or tech communities ### Benefits & Perks: - Competitive salary + equity - Top-tier laptop provided100% company-paid health benefits for base plan coverage, with the option to upgrade to higher-tier plans - 401(k) with company match - Unlimited, guilt-free vacation days - Annual wellness stipend (gym + other wellness activities) - Monthly house cleaning stipend - Annual travel allowance - Monthly cell phone & internet usage stipend - Charity donation company match - Employee referral bonus - Team offsites/activities