The Role
As a Backend Engineer, you'll design and implement APIs, optimize databases, tackle engineering challenges, and mentor team members at VacationRenter.
Summary Generated by Built In
About VacationRenter
VacationRenter is the fastest-growing vacation rental search engine. We love vacation rentals, but not how time-consuming and complex it can be to find the right one. So we reimagined a better way. We eliminated the need to search across several different sites and scroll through pages of irrelevant results just to find the perfect home away from home. We bring all the lodging options from the leading travel sites together in one place and showcase only the best results for each traveler.
VacationRenter was founded in 2018 and by 2020 had already driven over $1 billion in gross bookings, making us not only one of the fastest-growing websites across any industry but also the fastest-growing travel company ever. Due to this strong growth, VacationRenter was named to SimilarWeb's 100 fast-growing websites of 2020 and 2024.
VacationRenter was born inside Wilbur Labs, a Miami-based startup studio. Founded by ex-Googlers, VacationRenter combines an intuitive user experience with data-driven automation to help travelers find the perfect vacation rental.
About This Role
VacationRenter is actively seeking a talented Senior Backend Engineer to join our engineering organization. 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.
As a Senior Backend Engineer, you’ll work closely with product, engineering, and leadership to build the services and APIs that power our platform. You’ll help ensure high performance, reliability, and scalability, and contribute to the architecture and direction of our systems. This is a high-impact role where you'll have real ownership and the ability to shape engineering culture.
This position reports directly to the Head of Engineering.
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
Requirements/Qualifications:
- 5+ 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
Nice To Have:
- 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)
- Contributions to open-source projects or tech communities
Top Skills
AWS
Ci/Cd
GCP
Infrastructure As Code
Node.js
Postgres
Redis
SQL
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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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