Hopper

Senior Backend Engineer - Programmatic Merchandising

Posted on Jan 30, 2023

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Job Details

Full Time
📍Remote
🇺🇸 United States
🧔Senior

About Hopper

At Hopper, we are on a mission to become the world’s best — and most fun — place to book travel. By leveraging massive amounts of data, advanced machine learning algorithms, Hopper combines its world-class travel agency offering with proprietary fintech products to help customers spend less and travel better. Ranked the third largest online travel agency in North America, the app has been downloaded nearly 80 million times and continues to gain market share globally.

Here are just a few stats that demonstrate the company’s recent growth:

  • Hopper sold around $4 billion in travel and travel fintech in 2022, up nearly 3X over 2021. In 2022, Hopper increased its revenue 2.5X year-over year.
  • The company’s bespoke fintech products, such as Flight Disruption Guarantee and Price Freeze, now represent 30-40% of Hopper’s total app revenue.
  • Given the success of its fintech products, Hopper launched a B2B initiative called Hopper Cloud in late 2021. Through this partnership program, any travel provider (airlines, hotels, banks, travel agencies, etc.) can integrate and seamlessly distribute Hopper’s fintech or travel inventory. As its first Hopper Cloud partnership,
  • Hopper partnered with Capital One to co-develop Capital One Travel, a new travel portal designed specifically for cardholders.
  • Recognized as one of the world’s most innovative companies by Fast Company four years in a row, Hopper has been downloaded over 80 million times and continues to have millions of new installs each month.
  • Hopper has raised over $700 million USD of private capital and is backed by some of the largest institutional investors and banks in the world. Hopper is primed to continue its acceleration as the world’s fastest-growing mobile-first travel marketplace.

Come take off with us!

The Position

Join a rapidly growing company that is continuously redefining how people travel! The Programmatic Merchandising is a relatively young team helping deliver the most relevant content to users when they open the app.

Within the Programmatic Merchandising business unit, our Mobile Landing Content team is focused on providing the tools and frameworks necessary to deliver content to users on the home screen. We’re building a server-driven UI framework, unifying analytics across the organization, and totally own the home screen, which is the first thing users see when they launch the Hopper app. As a senior backend engineer on the team, you’ll be responsible for improving existing high traffic services as well as creating new ones to support multiple teams, as well as designing innovative solutions to problems on a very important part of the app, the home screen. You’ll collaborate with a tight team of talented engineers to break down complex problems, experiment quickly, and build things at internet scale.

Responsibilities:

  • Building new services that are easy to understand and consume by others
  • Improving services based on metrics such as latency and availability
  • Writing SLAs, SLOs and SLIs to ensure healthy services
  • Collaborate with teams across the company to achieve goalsImplement frameworks which will be consumed by several other teams
  • Influence the technical direction for the team
  • Collaborate with a diverse group of people, giving and receiving feedback for growth

Requirements

  • Minimum 3+ years professional experience in backend development
  • Love for building customer centric software
  • Solid understanding of microservices architecture
  • Professional experience developing data-heavy platforms or APIs
  • Willing to learn Scala
  • A passionate focus on quality, writing testable code that performs and scales
  • Thrived in backend engineering positions and delivered user experience at scale
  • A strong understanding of distributed systems and how architectural decisions affect performance and maintainability
  • Excelled in cross-functional teams, working fluidly with Product Managers, Data Scientists, Mobile Engineers, and other highly skilled specialists
  • A passion for personal technical growth and collaboration

Our Hiring Process

1. Intro call - A short call to have a high-level conversation about the role, its requirements and the candidate's experience. This is a great time for candidates to ask questions about the role to see if it is something they are passionate about!

2. Competency screening - We strive to ensure that our competency screenings align with the individual role very closely, if the candidate does not enjoy the assignment we recommend opting out of the process. Examples of screenings can be HackerRank tests, TripleByte screening quizzes, and technical screens with an interviewer.

We understand that technical screening is an investment of time and effort for our candidates so we offer $100 in Carrot Cash (Hopper’s in-app currency) to candidates who complete this step!

3. The interview loop - A full interview loop typically has 3-5 interviewers that meet with the candidate for up to an hour each. The goal of the loop is to gather further details about the candidate's competencies, first-principle thinking, and culture fit. The loop process is typically completed within 10 days of its start. While it requires a great deal of time, it has been extremely effective to determine if we are a mutual fit!

How to Ace Hopper’s Engineering Interviews:

https://assets.ctfassets.net/dllbbq2u2bi6/zoreSQeeWEmh243GTIY5f/6de45743394ecdcbaed62e424f825a9f/EngineeringRecruitmentGuide.pdf

4. The bar raiser - This is the final step in the process where candidates meet with a higher-level employee, who has passed Hopper’s internal Bar Raiser program. This step is a great opportunity for candidates to ask any remaining questions, especially about Hopper’s culture and business outlook as the Bar Raiser is a business leader. The intention of this step is to determine if the candidate will help Hopper “raise the bar” and hire the best talent out there.

TRUST THE PROCESS - Our goal:

It is a thorough process, but it works. At a glance, our success rates for interviews are approximately 3% from the intro call to hired and 20% from the loop to hired. Our goal is to provide candidates with as much information as possible regarding the interview process to ensure that there are no surprises. If you are currently interviewing and have any questions about this process please reach out to the recruiter or hiring manager!

Benefits

  • Well-funded and proven startup with large ambitions, competitive salary and stock options
  • Unlimited PTO
  • WeWork All Access Pass OR Work-from-home stipend
  • Entrepreneurial culture where pushing limits and taking risks is everyday business
  • Open communication with management and company leadership
  • Small, dynamic teams = massive impact
  • 100% employer-paid telemedicine, medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance plans
  • Access to a 401k
Senior Backend Engineer - Programmatic Merchandisingat Hopper