Hostaway Principal Engineer Core Platform EMEA

NOTE: This is a FULLY remote role, but the candidate must be within the EMEA region to collaborate with their team, peers, and internal customers. You do not have to be in the specific country or city shown in this listing, but please only apply if you are physically based within the EMEA region.

Hostaway is the market-leading SaaS scale-up transforming the vacation rental industry. With innovative solutions and partnerships with giants like Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking, we're taking on the competition and winning. Leveraging our customer-centric core values, we consistently deliver results that encourage growth, learning, and innovation for our team, our customers, and the industry.

As a profitable and growing company, this role is necessitated by our continued growth. Check out more about our recent funding round of $365 million here.

About the role

Our platform powers a global customer base, handling millions of transactions, integrating with industry giants like Airbnb & Expedia, and driving the future of short term rental tech. With $365M recently invested, we’re scaling fast—breaking down our monolithic architecture, designing for next-level scalability, reliability, and innovation.

As Principal Engineer, you'll be at the heart of this transformation, shaping how our platform evolves to support hundreds of integrations, complex workflows, and a rapidly growing customer base. If solving deep complex engineering challenges at scale excites you, let’s talk.

• 10+ years of experience in software development, with at least 2 years in a leadership role
• Expert-level proficiency in a Backend programming language, we use PHP.
• Hands-on experience with completing the transition to microservices architectures and Domain-Driven Design
• Strong understanding of both relational (MySQL) as well as no-SQL data stores (like DynamoDB or ElasticSearch), data modeling and optimization techniques
• Knowledge of containerisation technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, Fargate) and the associated ecosystem
• Experience with event-streaming platforms like Kafka or Kinesis
• Extensive experience with AWS services and cloud architecture
• Proven track record of leading and mentoring cross-functional engineering teams
• Experience with Agile methodologies and CI/CD practices
• Solid understanding of software design patterns and architectural distributed computing principles
• Experience with working in SaaS product companies

Nice to have skills for this role:

• Experience with front-end engineering (e.g., ReactJS, NextJS, TailwindUI and similar)
• Experience with performance monitoring and optimisation tools
• Understanding of security best practices in web applications
• Experience with scalability challenges in high-growth environments
• Knowledge of machine learning and AI concepts
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation)
• The ability to exert Extreme Programming values & techniques to the team

An Average Day for a Principal Engineer

• 10:00-10:15 Quick team stand-up, one of your team members seem to be working on a problem you worked on before, and offer to pair with them after the stand-up to support
• 10:30-14:00 Pairing with one of your team members to work on a complex scalability issue together and grabbing a quick bite to re-fuel those pesky braincells in-between coding sessions!
• 14:00-15:00 Doing a design session with the Product Manager and UX designer for a large upcoming feature that the team should pick up next week. You ask a lot of questions to drill down to the problem we are trying to solve, and suggest some easier solutions that require less effort for the team.
• 15:00-16:00 The design session triggered some thoughts about other areas of the system that will be affected. You’re doing a quick dive in the affected areas of the code and find some technical debt that might affect the system’s scalability or reliability. You create a brief Jira ticket and tag the Product Manager to help get it prioritised and to ensure it is not forgotten. You also ping the ticket to one of the other domains' tech leads, as you recall them mentioning a similar problem existing in another domain team.
• 16:00-16:30 Quick catch-up with the Engineering Manager on the teams delivery reliability and how you can help keep Work in Progress (WIP) and Pull Request (PR) review time to a minimum
• 16:30-18:00 Talking about PR’s, there are actually still a few open. You take the last part of the day to review your teams PRs. There are some great solutions offered, but one of the junior engineers introduced some code that is difficult to maintain and is lacking unit tests. You jump on a quick call with them to explain the issues and why it matters.