Staff Backend Engineer, PHP + Go - 100% remote - Europe

NOTE: This is a FULLY remote role, but the candidate must be within the European region 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 the European region.

Hostaway is the market-leading SaaS scale-up transforming the vacation rental industry. With innovative solutions and partnerships with giants like Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking, we're taking on the competition and winning. Leveraging our customer-centric core values, we consistently deliver results that encourage growth, learning, and innovation for our team, our customers, and the industry.

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:

Hostaway is seeking a highly motivated Staff Backend Engineer to join the Core team. This team is responsible for the integrations with our key partners (Online Travel Agencies). These integrations are critical to our customers’ daily workflows, powering seamless connectivity between their properties and major booking platforms. If you’ve worked on similar tools that handle huge volumes and interact with a variety of complex APIs, you’ll be a great fit! Staff Engineers are expected to govern the technical maturity for their respective domain, having a clear view of the architectural challenges and how to remediate them over time.

Having a close relationship with the domain’s Product Manager is key. While the PM brings the what, you are their peer responsible for bringing the how. Digging deep into the business problem the PM is trying to solve is key to be able to make the right decisions on how to shape the technical solution for the team to work on.

You’ll be supported by an Engineering Manager, who will help coordinate the team’s day-to-day work, maintain a sustainable delivery pace, and ensure the team is set up for success. Together, you’ll break down complex projects into manageable tasks and drive continuous improvement in our engineering practices.

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience in SaaS software development, with at least 2 years in a leadership role.

• Expert-level proficiency in any backend language or platform, with a strong willingness to dive deep into PHP + Go, as these are the primary languages we use in this domain

• Strong understanding of relational databases (like MySQL or PostgreSQL)

• Familiarity with transitioning event-driven service oriented architectures by applying Domain Driven Design (DDD) principles

• Experience in designing and developing RESTful web APIs

• Strong experience in writing Unit Tests and Integration Tests (jest or something similar)

• Experience working in a Cloud environment (AWS is a plus)

• Experience with message queues (e.g., AWS SQS) is a plus

• English language level C1

Nice to have skills for this role:

• Experience with NoSQL databases (like DynamoDB or MongoDB)

• Experience building cloud native apps, leveraging AWS managed services

• Having used PHP in the past or not afraid to dive into some of the current PHP business logic

• Applying, coaching and mentoring Extreme Programming (XP) agile practices

• Front-end experience with React and micro-frontends

• Knowledge of containerisation technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) and DevSecOps practices

An Average Day for a Staff Engineer

• 10:00-10:15 Quick team stand-up, one of your team members seem