Our current itinerary

Are you ready to shape the future of travel tech at scale? We are seeking an exceptional Staff Backend Developer to drive technical excellence across our entire booking platform. We’re among the leading travel tech companies in Europe, growing substantially and sustainably year after year, with a mission to make vacation home booking and hosting decisions stress-free and packed with joy. Our vibrant team of over 600 talented individuals from 60+ countries shares a passion for cutting-edge technology, constant improvement, and creating exceptional experiences for our 50,000 hosts and 100 million website users each year.

The Unique Challenge: Unlike typical e-commerce, our platform is built for major traffic swings — surging by up to 10x on weekends or in vacation periods. As a Staff Backend Developer, you’ll design systems that handle these peaks seamlessly while keeping response times under a second across the entire booking journey.

Your future team

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll be the technical leader across all teams in the guest experience department — from the list pages all the way through the checkout funnel to the Post Booking experience. You'll design and implement the overarching backend architecture that scales to handle millions of users, while establishing best practices that elevate the entire engineering department.

Our Tech Stack

Application tech stack: Java 21 and/or kotlin with spring Boot.
Data Infrastructure: Elasticsearch, postgreSQL, redis and redshift.
Cloud & DevOps: AWS, kubernetes, docker, jenkins, git, terraform.
Monitoring & Analytics: Sentry, ELK, prometheus, grafana, AWS Cloudwatch, looker, opsGenie, and internally developed technologies.

Your role in this journey

Technical Leadership & Strategy

Define the technical vision and strategy for the backend engineers of GX department, aligning with organizational goals and anticipating industry trends.
Architect scalable, high-availability backend systems serving 1M+ daily users across the entire booking platform.
Lead the design and implementation of department-wide technical initiatives that impact conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and technical excellence.

Cross-Team Collaboration & Influence

Partner with Engineering Managers and Department Leaders to shape the technical roadmap.
Contribute to specifications for large-scale projects, organizing parallel workstreams that reassemble into cohesive launches.
Work across six teams to enable a foundation for building cohesive user experiences.
Represent the backend department in high-level strategic discussions and decision-making processes.

Technical Excellence & Innovation

Establish, iterate on, and enforce engineering best practices (testing, documentation, architecture) department-wide.
Review code and set quality standards that become the gold standard across teams.
Identify and resolve architectural bottlenecks proactively, ensuring long-term scalability and maintainability.
Troubleshoot any production issues within the department, providing strategic solutions.

Mentorship & Knowledge Leadership

Mentor senior developers, helping them grow into technical leaders.
Lead department-wide knowledge sharing initiatives and technical workshops.
Define learning goals with Engineering Managers and drive continuous improvement.
Support and lead recruitment processes, from defining profiles to conducting interviews.

Your backpack is filled with

Technical Expertise

Over 8 years of backend development experience with strong expertise in building microservices using Java and Spring Boot, working with relational databases, and deploying applications in cloud environments.
Experience with Elasticsearch or other NoSQL databases is a plus.
Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps practices
Experience with using LLM for customer facing products and in improving DevEx.
Understanding of A/B testing, experimentation frameworks, and data-driven development is a plus.
Proven track record of architecting large-scale backend applications handling millions of users is a plus

Leadership & Strategic Thinking

Demonstrated ability to define and execute technical strategies at department or company level.
Experience leading cross-functional initiatives and influencing without direct authority.
Strong understanding of ROI and ability to make strategic short-term vs. long-term trade-offs.
Track record of successfully delivering complex, multi-team projects.

Business & Domain Knowledge

Ability to connect technical decisions to business KPIs and department goals.
Experience working closely with product and business stakeholders at all levels.
Understanding of e-commerce metrics, conversion optimization, and user experience is a plus.

Our adventure includes

Strategic Impact: Shape the technical direction of a rapidly growing travel tech leader
Technical Excellence: Work with cutting-edge technologies and influence architectural decisions
Leadership Growth: Lead initiatives that impact millions of users and mentor the next generation of engineers.
Innovation Culture: Champion bottom-up ideas and drive technical innovation department-wide.
Learning & Development: Substantial budget for conferences, courses, and continuous learning.
AI-Forward: Join a company embracing the AI revolution with regular meet-ups and knowledge exchanges.
Work-Life Balance: Hybrid model (2 days office), 28 vacation days + 10 unpaid, work abroad up to 8 weeks/year.
Competitive Package: Above-market compensation benchmarked against leading Munich scale-ups.
Growth Story: Be part of an 11-year success story with stable funding and path to profitability.

Want to travel with us?

Take a peek into our culture on Instagram @lifeatholidu and check out Tech at Holidu to meet the people behind the product.

Apply now and let’s make vacation dreams come true – at scale. Your first travel contact will be Lucia from HR.

For external headhunters: we are only working with a selected group of recruitment agencies and are not open to working with new headhunters.

We are committed to diversity in all aspects of our business. We encourage applications from all genders, all corners of the world and all individual backgrounds. You are welcome to submit your application without a photo and without stating your gender, date of birth, marital status, nationality or disability status (if applicable). If you require any special assistance when arranging interviews, office visits or the recruitment process in general, please contact the relevant HR person responsible for this job and we will do our best to accommodate your needs.