Senior Backend Engineer

About the Role

At Cloudbeds, we're transforming hospitality through an intelligently designed platform that powers properties across 150 countries, processing billions in bookings annually. As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Booking Engine squad, you'll implement new architectures, features, and best practices to scale the Cloudbeds platform, contributing to our move toward a service-oriented architecture using modern SaaS and AWS technologies. You'll work on systems where correctness, latency, and resilience under load are core priorities, delivering an exceptional experience to customers worldwide with quality, performance, and scalability top of mind.

The Booking Engine Team

This role is part of the Booking Engine Squad, the team behind the guest-facing reservation experience that powers direct bookings for tens of thousands of Cloudbeds properties worldwide. Direct bookings are one of the most valuable channels for properties, and we're constantly innovating to help them capture demand—from richer customization to entirely new booking experiences. The Booking Engine sits on the revenue-critical path, where speed, reliability, and attention to detail directly impact whether a guest completes a booking. It's one of our highest-leverage products, offering the opportunity to own real software used globally.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement features and improvements in PHP
• Design and build the APIs and integrations the booking flow depends on
• Model and evolve the data behind availability, pricing, and reservations
• Own the performance, scalability, and reliability of our services at scale
• Contribute to the ongoing initiative to migrate our core platform into microservices and event-driven services
• Lead discussions on complex technical concepts and requirements with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, drive technical decisions, and contribute to the backend architecture group
• Write clean, well-tested, well-documented, and elegant code, including documentation for new and existing areas of our application
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to plan, build, and ship high-quality features
• Mentor team members through pair programming and code reviews
• Re-architect and refactor existing systems, and help design the long-term vision for our technology and component architectures
• Advocate for engineering best practices, quality, and test automation across our code and processes

Requirements

• 5+ years of PHP web application software engineering experience
• Expert knowledge of relational databases, indexing, and searching technologies
• Experience with API-driven design and development
• Good product sense and empathy for our customers
• Solid Git fundamentals, including workflows and actions
• Strong knowledge of and passion for software best practices, design patterns, and testing, including test automation across unit, integration, and end-to-end levels
• Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills
• Strong communication, teamwork, and collaboration, with a real sense of ownership and good time management
• Passionate about agile practices and continuous improvement
• Business-level English fluency, verbal and written

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with PHP frameworks (Laravel or Symfony)
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes, AWS)
• Experience designing and building microservices
• Experience working with AI coding tools like Claude Code
• Experience working with a remote-first, globally distributed team
• Experience with Jira, Confluence, and GitHub
• Travel industry experience (a plus, but not required)

Pay

Depending on your skills and experience, you can expect your annual compensation to be between $140,000 and $160,000 USD for US-based candidates. We maintain high flexibility, and packages above this range will be considered.

Benefits

• Remote-first work environment
• PTO in accordance with local labor requirements
• Monthly Wellness Fridays—an extra-long weekend every month
• Fully paid parental leave
• Home office stipend based on country of residency
• Professional development courses in Cloudbeds University
• Access to professional development, including manager training, upskilling, and knowledge transfer

About Cloudbeds

Behind Cloudbeds' revolutionary technology is a team redefining what's possible in hospitality. We're 650+ employees across 40+ countries, bringing together elite engineers, AI architects, world-class designers, and hospitality veterans to solve challenges others haven't dared to tackle. Our diverse team speaks 30+ languages, united by a passion for innovation and travel. From pioneering breakthroughs in machine learning to revolutionizing how hotels operate, we're not just watching the future of hospitality unfold—we're coding it, designing it, writing it, and shipping it.

Cloudbeds has been recognized with awards such as Best All-In-One Hotel Management System (HotelTechAwards 2025), Overall 10 Best Places to Work (HotelTechAwards 2025), Most Loved Workplace® Certified (2024), Top 10 People’s Choice (2024), and Deloitte Technology Fast 500 (2024).