The Role
About VacationRenter
VacationRenter is the fastest growing vacation rental search engine. We love traveling, but not how time-consuming and complex it can be to find the right place to stay. So we reimagined a better way. We eliminated the need to search across several sites and scroll through pages of irrelevant results just to find the perfect home away from home.
We aggregate accommodations from the top travel sites, giving travelers all the best options in one place.
VacationRenter was born inside the startup studio Wilbur Labs. VacationRenter uses automation and AI to help travelers find the perfect stay. Be sure to check out our rebranded site, Vogo.com. Vogo is the same company travelers have come to love but under a new name.
About This Role
VacationRenter is seeking a versatile, highly skilled Senior Backend Engineer to join our engineering organization. In this role, you’ll help ensure high performance, reliability, and scalability, and contribute to the architecture and direction of our systems. Our backend systems are the backbone of the traveler experience, and this role plays a critical part in scaling our platform to support millions of users and high-volume transactions.
The ideal candidate will own key backend initiatives and help shape engineering culture, collaborating closely with product, engineering, and leadership to build the services and APIs that power our platform.
This role will report directly to the Head of Engineering. This is a full-time hybrid position, based in Dallas.
Role & Responsibilities:
- Design, architect, and implement robust APIs and services using Node.js, PostgreSQL, and Redis
- Optimize complex SQL queries and schemas to ensure lightning-fast performance across large datasets
- Tackle high-scale engineering challenges to ensure reliability and efficiency under heavy traffic
- Collaborate cross-functionally with product, engineering, and leadership teams on backend features
- Proactively identify and resolve technical debt; lead refactoring projects to future-proof our stack
- Participate in team standups, code reviews, and deployment processes
- Mentor and support other engineers, helping to elevate team-wide technical excellence
- Take ownership of projects and drive initiatives from concept to production
Minimum Qualifications:
- 8+ years of backend software engineering experience
- Strong experience with Node.js and PostgreSQL (or equivalent relational databases)
- Strong SQL skills - able to write, debug, and optimize complex queries on large datasets
- Experience working on high-volume, consumer-facing platforms
- Solid understanding of backend architecture, distributed systems, and scalability principles
- Experience with DevOps practices and cloud infrastructure (preferably Google Cloud or AWS), including CI/CD, monitoring, and infrastructure as code
- Entrepreneurial mindset with a self-driven, ownership mentality
- Excellent collaboration and communication skills
Preferred Qualifications & Prior Experience:
- Experience in the travel, marketplace, or e-commerce space
- Experience scaling systems to millions of daily users
- Experience building and deploying machine learning models using Vertex AI or similar platforms (e.g., SageMaker, Azure ML)
- Experience with React and Next.js
- Contributions to open-source projects or tech communities
Benefits & Perks:
- Competitive salary + equity
- Top-tier laptop provided100% company-paid health benefits for base plan coverage, with the option to upgrade to higher-tier plans
- 401(k) with company match
- Unlimited, guilt-free vacation days
- Annual wellness stipend (gym + other wellness activities)
- Monthly house cleaning stipend
- Annual travel allowance
- Monthly cell phone & internet usage stipend
- Charity donation company match
- Employee referral bonus
- Team offsites/activities
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The Company
What We Do
The studio identifies big customer pain points and builds businesses to solve these problems. After an idea is validated in the lab, the studio brings in industry leaders with domain expertise to manage the company. Wilbur Labs continues to provide funding, shared resources, and operational support to ensure management is focused on solving problems that matter. Wilbur Labs was founded in 2016 by Phil Santoro and David Kolodny.
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