Staff Software Engineer - Backend

About the company

ResortPass is redefining what it means to be a hotel guest. We’re building a new category in hospitality: day access to luxury hotel experiences from breathtaking pools and private beaches to deluxe spas and wellness recharges so people can escape without an overnight stay.

Our marketplace now connects guests with 2,400+ partner hotels and resorts, including Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons, Marriott Hilton, and more. We’ve helped millions of people enjoy premium hospitality close to home, making rest more mindful, togetherness more meaningful, and escape more accessible. The result: unforgettable experiences for guests and new revenue streams for partners.

Backed by some of the best consumer and growth investors, including CRV, Declaration, Brian Kelly (The Points Guy), WME, FJ Labs, and more, ResortPass is scaling a product people love and creating an entirely new way to experience hospitality.

About the role

We’re hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to be a technical anchor for ResortPass’s marketplace foundation. Reporting directly to the Head of Engineering, you’ll be a key partner in setting the technical vision and architecture roadmap and driving the execution that makes it real.

This role has broad influence across the org:

• Marketplace Consumer & Growth: enable the rewrite of our most important customer journeys (Search and Hotel Details experiences) by defining backend contracts, improving correctness and performance, and reducing friction for product iteration.
• Hotels: shape the backend architecture as we integrate with multiple spa booking platforms, ensuring reliable ingestion, reconciliation, and operational tooling.
• Platform: partner to build shared services and standards that accelerate delivery and improve reliability across teams.

If you’re looking for a staff-level role with real leverage, architecture, systems correctness, performance, reliability, and mentorship, this is it.

This role will be in person at our energetic NYC headquarters. The base salary for this role will range from $200,000 - $240,000 per year, plus equity, commensurate with experience.

What you’ll do

• Set backend architectural direction for core marketplace domains (e.g., pricing, availability, booking flows, partner integrations), balancing scalable long-term design with pragmatic near-term delivery.
• Be the technical partner to the Head of Engineering on backend strategy: define the architecture roadmap, sequence initiatives, and drive org alignment through clear decision-making.
• Lead design reviews and RFCs for major changes; ensure decisions are well-reasoned, documented, and implemented consistently across teams.
• Make the existing Ruby on Rails platform scale and perform at its peak: improve throughput and latency, reduce hotspots, raise reliability, and strengthen operational readiness.
• Define and enforce API contract discipline across teams to speed iteration and reduce breakage (clear ownership boundaries, versioning strategy, rollout patterns, and performance budgets).
• Build for integrations at scale with external spa booking platforms: robust sync workflows, reconciliation, retries, monitoring, and recovery.
• Raise engineering standards through code review, mentorship, and setting a quality bar around correctness, testing, and observability.

Tech stack

• Backend: Ruby on Rails, Node.js
• Data: Postgres, MongoDB
• Infrastructure: AWS, ECS
• Observability: Datadog

Your experience

We encourage candidates to apply even if they don’t have 100% of the below qualifications. We believe in a holistic approach when evaluating talent for our team and post new roles often, so even if this role isn’t quite right, we want to meet you!

• 8+ years building production backend systems (or equivalent senior-level impact and scope).
• Proven track record leading large, business-critical initiatives end-to-end (rewrites, migrations, or foundational platform improvements).
• Strong backend architecture judgment: can make tradeoffs that stick and reduce long-term complexity.
• Deep experience with datastores and data modeling, and strong instincts around correctness, performance, and reliability.
• Ability to influence across teams without direct authority—aligning product teams, platform teams, and stakeholders to a cohesive technical approach.
• Strong operational ownership: you care about what happens after launch (instrumentation, debugging, incidents, iterative improvement).
• You actively mentor and raise the bar through standards, design reviews, and communication.

Nice to have

• Marketplace domain experience (pricing, availability, booking, partner integrations).
• Experience scaling Rails systems and improving performance under real traffic.
• Experience building shared services or platform primitives used by multiple teams.

What success looks like

Within 6–12 months, you will have:

• Helped establish a clear backend architecture roadmap and drove execution on the highest-leverage milestones.
• Enabled faster iteration on key customer journeys through stronger backend contracts, clearer domain ownership, and reduced cross-team friction.
• Improved system performance and reliability on critical flows (measurable reductions in incidents and improved latency/throughput).
• Built a scalable integration foundation for spa booking platforms with robust sync + operational tooling.
• Raised the engineering bar through mentorship, design reviews, and reusable backend patterns.

Perks & benefits

• Health, Dental & Vision — We're deeply invested in the health and well-being of our team and are proud to contribute to the monthly premiums of these insurance plans.
• Stock Option Plan — We offer employees the opportunity to become part-owners in our mission. Let’s redefine what it means to be a guest, together.
• 401k plan — Save for your future with a 410k plan offering.
• Unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO) — Enjoy life away from work to be inspired and fully recharge with unlimited paid time off.
• Paid parental leave
• Commuter benefits
• Annual ResortPass credit — Our mission is to bring delight and relaxation to people around the world; including our employees! Access private beaches, deluxe saunas, awesome pools, and much more with your annual credit.