Description

At Wander, we're revolutionizing the travel experience, and we're looking for a Staff Engineer to own the technical architecture of our core platform and set the standard for software excellence across multiple product squads. This isn't just a coding role; you'll work elbow-to-elbow with product, design, and operations leadership, making foundational decisions that unlock new lines of business, accelerate developer productivity, and deliver reliable guest and homeowner experiences at scale.

This role is tailor-made for engineers who have a proven track record of leading teams through hyper-growth and major platform refactors, transforming monoliths into scalable ecosystems, and building composable, enduring platforms.

What You'll Do

• Architect the Platform: Define and evolve the technical north star for Wander’s critical booking, pricing, property-ops, and homeowner systems, expertly balancing immediate product needs with long-term flexibility.
• Raise the Engineering Bar: Drive clear patterns for service boundaries, robust observability, comprehensive testing, and efficient CI/CD that empower engineers to ship with confidence and speed.
• Mentor & Uplift: Coach staff and senior engineers, lead impactful design reviews, and model pragmatic, empathetic leadership within our fully remote, async-first culture.
• Lead Cross-Functional Initiatives: Partner deeply with product and data teams to design and implement cutting-edge LLM-powered pricing, dynamic content, and transformative operational tooling.
• Scale with Quality: Guide the team through rigorous capacity planning, proactive performance tuning, and insightful incident retrospectives as we aim to 10x traffic and double our product surface.
• Champion Developer Experience: Shape internal platforms, tooling, and documentation to ensure every new hire can be productive and impactful within their first week.

What We're Looking For

• You’ve repeatedly scaled production systems and have operated at the Staff level (or higher) for several years.
• Demonstrated success designing extensible, composable service or plugin architectures that have effectively served multiple product lines.
• Deep experience with TypeScript & Node.js (our primary language), coupled with a polyglot mindset and the comfort to choose the right tool for the job – be it Go, Rust, Python, or others when TypeScript isn’t the best fit.
• Mastery of PostgreSQL (or equivalent RDBMS), event-driven patterns (Kafka, NATS, or similar), and cloud-native infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure).
• A strong track record of embedding observability (structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics) and reliability engineering into everyday workflows.
• Comfort running monorepos and designing efficient build pipelines that support hundreds of daily deploys.
• Hands-on experience integrating LLM or AI services into production systems is a strong plus.
• Proven ability to mentor, influence, and communicate effectively – whether through detailed design docs, engaging Slack threads, or synchronous deep-dives.

What Success Looks Like

• Within 30 days: You will have authored a platform architecture roadmap, successfully rallied stakeholders around critical trade-offs, and landed your first strategic migration.
• By month 3: You will be the go-to architect for at least one major domain (e.g., pricing, inventory, homeowner finance) and will have launched features that scale gracefully under peak demand.
• After 6 months: You will have cultivated a culture of technical excellence where other engineers feel deeply supported, production incidents are virtually non-existent, and new products launch on a robust foundation you helped design.

Our Tech Stack

• Runtime: Node.js, TypeScript, Fastify
• Data: PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka
• LLM: OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, Langfuse
• Cloud: GCP
• Infrastructure-as-Code: Pulumi
• Containerization: Docker, Kubernetes
• Build & CI/CD: Yarn, Turbo, SWC, GitHub Actions
• Observability: Atatus, Sentry, Axiom

Note: If you feel strongly that you have what it takes for this role but don’t check 100% of the boxes—that’s okay—we encourage you to apply anyway and highlight what you can bring to the table.