Staff Software Engineer – Platform & Architecture

About Wander

Wander is revolutionizing the $100B+ short‑term rental industry. We curate every aspect of the guest experience – from our smart homes to our intuitive booking platform. Our mission is to help people find their happy place, and our vision is to build the infrastructure that lets people experience the world.

Fresh off our Series B, we’re entering a phase of rapid expansion. Our engineering organization is already filled with talented, high‑velocity developers; now we’re looking for seasoned technical leaders to guide the ship, shape the platform, and cultivate the next generation of Wander products.

The Opportunity

As a Staff Engineer at Wander you will own the technical architecture of our core platform and set the standard for software excellence across multiple product squads. You’ll work elbow‑to‑elbow with product, design, and operations leadership to make foundational decisions that unlock new lines of business, accelerate developer productivity, and deliver reliable guest and homeowner experiences at scale.

This role is tailor-made for engineers who have led teams through hyper-growth and major platform refactors, led teams through explosive growth, turned monoliths into ecosystems, and built composable platforms that last.

What You’ll Do

• Architect the Platform. Define and evolve the technical north star for Wander’s booking, pricing, property‑ops, and homeowner systems – balancing immediate product needs with long‑term flexibility.

• Raise the Engineering Bar. Drive clear patterns for service boundaries, observability, testing, and CI/CD that enable engineers to ship with confidence.

• Mentor & Uplift. Coach staff and senior engineers, run design reviews, and model pragmatic, empathetic leadership in a fully remote, async‑first culture.

• Lead Cross‑Functional Initiatives. Partner with product and data teams to design LLM‑powered pricing, dynamic content, and operational tooling.

• Scale with Quality. Guide the team through capacity planning, performance tuning, and incident retrospectives as we 10x traffic and double our product surface.

• Champion Developer Experience. Shape internal platforms, tooling, and documentation so that every new hire can be productive within their first week.

What We’re Looking For

• You’ve repeatedly scaled production systems and have operated at Staff level (or higher) for several years.

• Demonstrated success designing extensible, composable service or plugin architectures that served multiple product lines.

• Deep experience with TypeScript & Node.js (our primary language) plus a polyglot mindset and comfortable choosing the right tool for the job – Go, Rust, Python, or others when TypeScript isn’t the best fit.

• Mastery of PostgreSQL (or equivalent RDBMS), event‑driven patterns (Kafka, NATS, or similar), and cloud‑native infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure).

• Track record embedding observability (structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics) and reliability engineering into everyday workflows.

• Comfort running monorepos and designing build pipelines that support hundreds of daily deploys.

• Hands-on experience integrating LLM or AI services into production systems is a strong plus.

• Proven ability to mentor, influence, and communicate – whether in design docs, Slack threads, or synchronous deep‑dives.

What Success Looks Like

• Within 30 days you have authored a platform architecture roadmap, rallied stakeholders around trade‑offs, and landed your first strategic migration.

• By month 3 you are the go‑to architect for at least one major domain (e.g., pricing, inventory, homeowner finance) and have launched features that scale gracefully under peak demand.

• After 6 months you have built a culture of technical excellence where other engineers feel supported, production incidents are non-existent, and new products launch on a foundation you helped design.

Our Tech Stack

• Runtime: Node.js, TypeScript, Fastify

• Data: PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka

• LLM: OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, Langfuse

• Cloud: GCP

• Infrastructure‑as‑Code: Pulumi

• Containerization: Docker, Kubernetes

• Build & CI/CD: Yarn, Turbo, SWC, GitHub Actions

• Observability: Atatus, Sentry, Axiom

Why Wander

• Define the platform that will power the next decade of travel tech.

• Work with a focused, product‑obsessed team operating at startup speed.

• Fully remote, async‑first culture – live where you want, work when you work best.

• Competitive salary plus meaningful equity.

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage.

• 401(k) with company match.

• Clear promotion paths to Distinguished Engineer or Engineering Director.

Join Us

If you thrive on turning ambitious product visions into elegant, scalable systems, and you’re excited to coach the brightest engineers in the industry – we’d love to meet you. Apply today and help Wander build the infrastructure for people to experience the world.