Senior Product Engineer - Booking Management

Job description

Hi! 👋 I'm [Sam](https://www.linkedin.com/in/srmillington/), Engineering Manager for Team Booking Management at WeTravel. I joined WeTravel to help simplify how group travel businesses handle payments and bookings. Our Booking Management team owns the journey from the moment a traveler decides to book: checkout flows, order management, tax management, and everything that enables travelers to easily make a reservation and manage it afterwards. Last year alone, over a million travelers booked adventures through our platform! As we streamline and localize our booking experience, I'm looking for engineers who are excited about making complex booking and commerce flows feel simple for our global users. ## About WeTravel: Think of the most incredible adventures imaginable: trekking to Machu Picchu, cycling through Tuscany, or going on a safari in Kenya. For years, the small businesses and local experts who run these trips have been stuck using messy spreadsheets, countless emails, and complicated payment methods. WeTravel is changing that. We build the tools that empower any entrepreneur to launch and grow their own travel business. Our platform makes it simple for organizers to create beautiful trip proposals, securely process payments, and manage their customers, so they can focus on what they do best: creating amazing experiences. This is one of the last great frontiers of travel to come online, and as the category leader, we are at the forefront of this change. **Last year alone, our platform was trusted by 8,000 organizers to lead over a million travelers on adventures in 150+ countries.** Now, we're on an exciting journey to grow from powering $1B to $10B in travel experiences per year. We believe that every trip, when done right, can be a force for good - and we're building the engine to make more of that possible. ## What's the role: You will join the Booking Management team to lead critical projects across checkout, order management, tax management, and traveler self-service. Upcoming work includes: - **Checkout experience:** streamlining and localizing our checkout flows so travelers in every market can complete a reservation in just a few clicks. - **Order management:** building the foundational systems for organizers and travelers to view, modify, and manage reservations end-to-end - changes, transfers, cancellations, and everything in between. - **Tax management:** expanding our tax capabilities across jurisdictions so organizers can sell compliantly wherever their travelers are. - **Reliability and structural improvements:** scaling our booking flows to support 10x growth. ## **What you'll do day-to-day:** - Lead booking projects end-to-end: discovery with Product and Customer teams, solution design, build, rollout, monitoring, and incident response. - Partner with the Product team to gain insight into organizer and traveler challenges, building booking experiences that convert and delight. - Own the reliability of our booking and order management systems - Contribute to WeTravel's engineering practices and excellence. ## How we work: - We're focused on the impact. We don't subscribe to any one framework or execution ideology, and we adapt based on what's impactful. - We're using the latest hardware and constantly on the look out for better tools & ways to work. - We have AI-first development experience and work with the latest models and agentic dev tools. - Stack: We're developing React/TypeScript, Ruby on Rails and Kotlin Microservices. Our services run on Kubernetes. We also use and love MongoDB, MySQL, Postgres, Snowflake and we're working with the major LLM providers. ## You should apply if you have: **Basic qualifications:** - 7+ years of product engineering expertise, with 4+ years dedicated to architecting complex e-commerce, booking, or order management systems. - Proven track record within a high-scale consumer checkout, marketplace, travel, or e-commerce platform team. - Broad practical expertise in building and troubleshooting production-level checkout and order flows: conversion-critical funnels, pricing and tax calculation, availability and inventory, cancellations, modifications, and refund flows. You possess deeply ingrained expertise in order state machines, multi-step form UX, and the operational tooling that keeps commerce systems running. - Strong backend mastery in Ruby on Rails, Kotlin, Python, Go, Java, or Node.js with the agility to ramp up on Ruby quickly. - Full-stack comfort: you can build the React interface for the booking flows you architect. - Deep expertise in architecting robust, resilient distributed systems, including order and reservation state machines, idempotency, exactly-once semantics, event-driven architectures, webhooks, and reliable consumer patterns. - Direct production on-call experience, including authoring post-mortems and leading incident response. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including cross-functional collaboration experience, and the ability to thrive in a distributed, multicultural environment. - Pragmatic adoption of AI tools to optimize your engineering workflow, including the ability to mentor and train others on AI concepts. **Technical Skills** - Strong background in cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), containerization, and modern CI/CD practices. - Experience in handling critical systems with precision: you will handle pricing and tax logic directly within the application layer. - Bonus: Direct experience with tax engines or multi-jurisdiction tax compliance (VAT, GST, sales tax), or with travel-industry reservation systems. **Preferred qualifications:** - Experience launching or significantly redesigning a checkout or booking flow end-to-end. - Experience building tax calculation or compliance capabilities across multiple jurisdictions. - Experience in marketplace or two-sided platform commerce (orders spanning buyers, sellers, and modifications over time). ## You might not be the right fit if you: - Your commerce expertise is limited to plugging in off-the-shelf checkout or cart solutions. We need someone who operates deeply beneath that abstraction layer. - You are hesitant to take full ownership of mission-critical booking flows or participate in the on-call rotation when systems fail. - You prioritize greenfield development over the complex challenge of scaling and refining an existing system with significant booking volume. - You are looking for a siloed IC position without the need for cross-functional collaboration or product-level discovery. - You require a rigid, pre-defined roadmap; we prefer to sharpen our strategy and direction as we scale the team. ## Why join us? - Solve real commerce problems at real volume: over a million travelers booking adventures in 150+ countries, and growing. - Make a real impact: you'll help build the operating system for the multi-day group travel industry, empowering thousands of organizers and millions of travelers worldwide. - Solve meaningful technical challenges at scale, from designing robust systems to improving real-time user experiences in a complex domain. - Be part of building the best engineering team: you'll help shape culture, mentor others, and contribute to high standards of excellence and collaboration. - Enjoy flexibility and balance, with competitive compensation, generous PTO, and remote-friendly work culture. ## **Benefits Section** - Competitive salary - Generous "Time to Recharge" policy - enjoy unlimited paid time off to rest, recharge, and show up as your best self. - Work remotely for a maximum of 4 weeks per calendar year. - 2-week cross-functional onboarding program. - Annual team off-site (often somewhere sunny 🌞). - Cycle-to-work scheme (Swapfiets subscription) or commuting reimbursement. - Monday/Thursday team lunches and after-work social events. - Extensive paid family leave. - Three paid volunteer days per year - take time to give back to causes you care about, on us. - Cutting-edge equipment and tools to set you up for success. - Join an international, travel-loving team with a passion for adventure and innovation. ## Equal Opportunities WeTravel is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. If you're excited about this opportunity and believe you're a good fit, we encourage you to apply and join us in transforming the travel industry!