Principal Backend Engineer

Company Description
Help shape the future of global travel technology.
Luxury Escapes is one of the world's fastest-growing travel companies, with over 8 million members. We were recently awarded the National Travel Industry Award for Most Outstanding Online Travel Agency, and we're just getting started.

We're looking for a Principal Backend Engineer to join our engineering leadership group and help drive the evolution of our platform as we scale rapidly and explore new frontiers in travel, operations, and technology.

Working at Luxury Escapes
Our mission is to delight our customers with incredible deals for the world's best holidays. We are a collective of forward-thinking people, driven to challenge the travel industry and ourselves to bring outstanding travel experiences to our customer community.

Our Sydney office is on Kent Street - a short walk from Wynyard station and close to great cafes in Barangaroo.

• Luxury Escapes is an in-person company. We work and collaborate together, face to face in our Barangaroo office.**

Job Description
About the Role
As a Principal Backend Engineer, you'll work on high-impact initiatives that span teams and business units. You'll guide architecture decisions, lead complex systems design, and bring deep backend expertise to projects that touch everything from finance to customer service to infrastructure.

Potential Projects You Could Tackle
Finance Platform from the Ground Up

• Help build a new financial system to power our core business operations. The domain demands precise data flows, auditability, and accuracy — posing some of the most interesting technical challenges in the company.

AI-Powered Operations & Customer Experience

• Work on cutting-edge internal tools that supercharge our customer service and operational teams using the latest advancements in AI, automation, and data intelligence.

Engineering Excellence (EngEx)

• Help scale our platform-wide architecture and influence cross-team technical strategy. This includes mentoring senior engineers, designing foundational services, and setting standards that level up the entire engineering org.

What You'll Do

• Define and drive technical strategy and architecture for complex, business-critical systems
• Design and lead the implementation of scalable, resilient backend services
• Collaborate across product, data, and engineering teams to align tech solutions with business goals
• Solve large-scale backend challenges involving data integrity, latency, throughput, and observability
• Mentor engineers, conduct architectural reviews, and foster a high-performance engineering culture
• Influence platform-wide standards for code quality, system design, and infrastructure

Qualifications
About You

• Extensive experience with backend development (JavaScript/TypeScript preferred, but not required)
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and microservices
• Strong knowledge of database design, performance tuning, and data consistency strategies
• Experience with secure, auditable systems — especially in financial or regulated domains
• Strong technical leadership and architectural decision-making skills
• Comfortable operating in fast-paced, cross-functional environments with high autonomy
• Bonus: experience with AI/ML integrations, workflow automation, or internal developer platforms

If you're excited about working on high-scale systems and solving meaningful problems — even if you don't tick every box, we'd love to hear from you.
Additional Information

What's in it for you?
We Consider Our People One Of Our Most Important Assets – And We Want Our Team To Love Their Working Lives When You Work For Luxury Escapes, You Can Look Forward To

• Excellent Remuneration package
• 20% Discount on Luxury Holidays and Experiences
• Breakfast and lunch are provided 5-days a week
• Health and Well-being programs
• Hackathons
• 1/2 day of bonus birthday leave
• A super collaborative team that enjoys creating great platforms

If you're interested in the role but don't check every box, apply anyway, we'd love to hear from you
We embrace diversity in our people and make hiring decisions based on your experiences and skills. We do not discriminate based on gender identity, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability status. You'll find a collaborative, inclusive, and respectful workplace here at Luxury Escapes, and we are proud to celebrate who you are. Please let us know if you require any reasonable adjustments during the interview.
As a 2025 Circle Back Initiative employer, we're committed to responding to every applicant.