Senior Software Engineer (Travel Systems)

About the Role

At Going, we help people travel and experience the world. As a bootstrapped and profitable travel-tech company with over 2.5 million members, we’re building the most delightful and intelligent travel platform in everyone’s pocket.

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Travel team, you’ll play a key role in architecting and scaling the backend systems that power our flight deal discovery, data ingestion, inventory search, booking systems, and more. You’ll work on core systems like GDS integrations, our internal APIs, async job pipelines, and authentication services — all in service of delivering magical travel experiences to our members.

This role blends deep technical ownership with meaningful cross-team collaboration, mentorship, and hands-on contributions.

In the short term, you will

• Ramp up on Going’s backend services, architecture, codebase, and deployment pipelines.

• Contribute to core travel systems including APIs, GDS integrations, and async workflows.

• Lead development of backend features in collaboration with product, data, and mobile/web engineers.

• Propose and implement performance, reliability, or maintainability improvements in existing services.

• Pair with and mentor engineers across the team to share best practices and raise technical quality.

• Help shape the future of our system design through thoughtful, pragmatic engineering contributions.

In the long term, you will

• Own and evolve core components of our backend architecture, especially around travel systems integrations.

• Lead greenfield development of scalable systems that support Going’s backend and data capabilities.

• Drive improvements in service observability, fault tolerance, performance, and data integrity.

• Collaborate with other engineering leaders to shape technical strategy, service boundaries, and system evolution.

• Mentor engineers and champion engineering best practices in design, testing, documentation, and incident response.

• Influence engineering-wide standards, helping us scale while maintaining technical excellence and joy of development.

Our Values:

• Champion travelers - We grow by delivering measurable value to members.

• Pilots, not passengers - We take ownership with a bias for action, urgency, and shared responsibility.

• Bet boldly - We tackle ambitious problems by making data-driven bets.

• Start simple - We iterate quickly to quality.

• Make it magical - We spark the joy of travel through thoughtful moments of surprise and delight.

• Go further - We push a little harder and care a little more, especially when it matters most, because effort compounds over time.

Must have's

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience in high-scale, distributed systems.

• Proficiency in both statically and dynamically typed programming languages (e.g., Go and Python/Ruby).

• Strong knowledge of Linux-based systems, system debugging, and operational fundamentals.

• Deep experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred), caching (Redis), and async job queues (e.g., Sidekiq, Celery).

• Experience working with APMs and observability tooling (e.g., Datadog, New Relic).

• Clear, empathetic communication skills and ability to work collaboratively with engineers, product managers, and designers.

• You’re able to work US hours, and you’re legally authorized to work in the United States.

Nice to have's:

• MS/MA in Computer Science or related engineering field.

• Extensive Golang experience, especially with protobuf and gRPC.

• Familiarity with modern backend architecture patterns including service decomposition, event-driven systems, and data pipelines.

• Experience modernizing or refactoring legacy codebases in high-availability systems.

• Exposure to travel technology platforms or GDS systems is a plus.

Technologies we use:

• Backend: Golang (protobuf + gRPC), Redis, PostgreSQL

• Frontend & Mobile: Next.js, React Native

• Data & ML: Apache Iceberg, Starburst Galaxy, Databricks

• Tooling & DevOps: GitHub, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Datadog

• Collaboration: Notion, Jira