About this role
This is an ownership role.
You will inherit a working but evolving production system built by someone else. There is a real list of things that need fixing. Your first job is to understand it deeply, make it stable, and make it something a small team can safely change.
After that, you will extend it — one module at a time, sequenced against business priorities, alongside one other engineer.
We want to be direct about what this is: it is a rescue-and-build role at a company with real revenue and real clients, where you will be the most senior technical person and your decisions will stand. If you have been waiting for a role where you own the whole system rather than a slice of it, this is that role.
What you will do
First 60 days — take custody
- Run the technical handover from our development partner
- Read and map the entire codebase; produce the architecture documentation
- Audit security, infrastructure, backup and restore, and access control
- Produce a prioritised risk and remediation plan and walk the founders through it
Months 3–4 — make it solid
- Fix the defect backlog, working directly with our agents who use the platform daily
- Build automated test coverage on the paths that cost money when they break: booking, ticketing, cancellation, refund, amendment
- Harden supplier integrations — timeouts, retries, idempotency, reconciliation when our records and a supplier's disagree
- Improve search and booking performance
- Set up proper CI/CD, staging, monitoring and alerting
Ongoing — own it
- Lead technical design and make the architecture calls
- Write code. This role is roughly 60% hands-on and stays that way.
- Review all code that ships, including your own team's
- Interview and onboard our second engineer, then mentor them
- Own production: uptime, incidents, escalation
- Work directly with the founders who know the travel domain deeply and act as product owners to turn business requirements into technical plans
- Advise on what we should build versus buy
Our stack
- Frontend: Next.js / React, deployed on Vercel
- Backend & data: AWS
- AI: OpenAI APIs, with more AI features on the roadmap
- Source control & CI: GitHub
What we are looking for
Must have
- 8+ years building and shipping production software, full-stack
- Strong Next.js / React and TypeScript, and strong backend, you'll work across both daily
- Hands-on AWS depth: compute, RDS or equivalent, networking, IAM, secrets management, cost control
- Practical Vercel experience, including its constraints
- GitHub Actions or comparable CI/CD
- Strong SQL and data modelling, including performance tuning on real workloads
- Demonstrated experience taking over a codebase built by someone else and improving it incrementally, this matters more to us than greenfield experience
- Production ownership: you have been the person responsible when a live system broke
- Solid cloud infrastructure competence
- Experience integrating third-party APIs
- Fluent with AI-assisted development — Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot or equivalent and with clear judgement about where it helps and where it should not be trusted. You use it to move faster on comprehension, test generation and documentation, and you never ship code you cannot explain line by line.
- Experience building with LLM APIs in production (we use OpenAI) — structured output extraction, function/tool calling, prompt design, and evaluating non-deterministic systems rather than shipping on impressions
Strongly Preferred
- Travel technology: GDS (Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport), NDC, hotel aggregators (TBO, Hotelbeds, Rezlive), airline ticketing, PNR workflows
- MCP (Model Context Protocol) — building or operating MCP servers to expose internal systems and data to AI agents and coding tools
- RAG architectures and vector search — retrieval over fare rules, supplier content and client travel policies
- Speech pipelines (STT/TTS) for voice agents, or WhatsApp Business API — both are on our roadmap
- Payment systems, settlement or reconciliation experience
- Multi-tenant B2B SaaS
- Prior first-engineer or early-stage experience at a startup
- Experience mentoring engineers