Staff Backend Engineer

Job description

NOTE: This is a FULLY remote role, but the candidate must be within EMEA to collaborate with their team, peers, and internal customers. You do not have to be in the specific country or city shown in this listing, but please only apply if you are physically based within EMEA.

Trusted by 20,000+ property managers worldwide, Hostaway is an industry leading, AI-powered vacation rental management platform designed for professional short-term rental operators. Hostaway brings everything together for greater efficiency and faster growth.

Profitable, high-growth, and the first short-term rental PMS unicorn 🦄. Join us at our most exciting stage yet! Learn more about our recent valuation and story here.

About the role

We are looking for a delivery-focused Staff Backend Engineer to build our new 0-1 Trust Accounting subsystem. This is a greenfield opportunity to design and deliver a financial system that property managers can trust—one that is accurate, compliant, and reliable.

You will have a significant impact on shaping the financial operations of Hostaway's customers, allowing them to maintain compliant records and properly manage funds.

As a founding member of this new team, you will be responsible for the architecture and technical direction of this critical platform. You’ll influence architecture, processes, and delivery from day one, establishing a culture where correctness and accountability are paramount. Your work will directly determine how effectively Hostaway can deliver secure and auditable financial services to our customers.

What You’ll Do

• Architect a Greenfield System: Lead the greenfield development, owning the architecture and technical vision for the V1 Trust Accounting product.

• Build Production-Grade Financial Infrastructure: Design and implement the core backend services for a secure, scalable, and auditable trust accounting subsystem with the highest quality standards.

• Drive Quality and Reliability: Establish quality gates, robust testing, and CI/CD integration to ensure every feature ships with measurable confidence and correctness.

• Champion Engineering Best Practices: Drive best practices for system design, observability, and security across the organization, with a focus on quality, resilience, and financial accuracy.

• Collaborate and Influence: Work closely with product, design, finance, and legal teams to deliver a seamless product. Provide technical context in discussions to foster transparency and accountability.

• Mentor and Elevate Engineers: Raise the technical bar across the team and beyond through code reviews, architectural guidance, and hands-on pairing.

Job requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years operating at a Staff Engineer or equivalent level.

• Backend Expertise: High proficiency in a backend language for building production-grade services.

• Production Experience: You've built, shipped, and operated critical backend systems that serve real users at scale. You understand the operational realities of reliability, observability, and failure modes.

• Strong Architectural Instincts: You can design systems that start simple and evolve gracefully, making pragmatic trade-offs between speed and extensibility.

• Cross-Team Influence: You lead through clarity and credibility, not authority, and have successfully driven the adoption of platforms, patterns, or standards.

• Infrastructure Fluency: Comfortable with AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and operating services in production.

• Polyglot Comfort: You have the curiosity and adaptability to integrate with code across these technologies.

Nice to have:

• Experience with Accounting or Ledger Products: Familiarity with financial systems, accounting principles, or ledger products is a significant plus.

• Backend expertise: hands on production experience with Golang.

What Success Looks Like

• The Trust Accounting subsystem is delivered reliably, is trusted by customers and regulators, and integrates seamlessly into the Hostaway platform.

• The system is high-throughput and low-error, providing accurate, auditable data to customers.

• Financial correctness and compliance are central to the product's design and operation.

• You become a go-to technical authority for financial systems and backend architecture at Hostaway.

• The platform scales to meet growing demand without requiring a fundamental re-architecture.

What we offer

• Competitive Compensation: We offer competitive pay based on market rates in the country of the applicant.

• 100% Remote: Enjoy the freedom to work from anywhere within your country of residence—be it a co-working space, your home office, or even your dining room table. The choice is yours. Just don’t ask to work in our office (we don’t have one).

• Equity: Every role in our company comes with valuable stock options in a fast-growing and profitable company. This ensures we all share in the company’s success.

• Values-Driven Leadership: Our Core Values are not just words we’ve written to make us feel good. We leverage them daily when making strategic and tactical decisions.

• Professional Growth: Our rapid growth offers unparalleled learning and development opportunities, along with a multitude of career advancement opportunities.

• Annual Paid Leave: The specific amounts vary by country and are aligned with country and/or contract-specific norms.

• Geographic Specific Benefits: As an international employer, we offer different country-specific benefits such as Health Insurance and Pensions in countries where these perks are customary. The specifics depend on the country of the applicant.

• Dynamic Team Culture: As a global company with team members in over 40 countries, our diverse and international culture fuels our innovation and creativity, providing a key pillar to our success (and making it a lot of fun to work here).

Thank you for your interest. If you apply for this role, you will receive an email from our Talent Acquisition team after your application has been reviewed alongside the qualifications for this role and the qualifications of others who have applied.