Senior Backend Engineer, Platform

Apaleo; United States; Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

International team

Learning budget

Autonomy

Real impact

Competitive pay

Flexible work

Vacation 30 days

Public transport covered

Job summary

Apaleo, a hospitality tech platform, is hiring a backend engineer to own critical infrastructure and drive end-to-end platform initiatives. You’ll work directly with the Platform Lead in a small team, designing scalable systems on AWS, embracing Terraform, and shaping tooling to improve reliability and developer experience.

The role requires hands-on ownership of cloud-native services, collaboration across engineering, and a focus on observability, CI/CD modernization, and AI-assisted

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend development experience with ownership of substantial technical work.
• Hands-on ownership of infrastructure, reliability or performance in cloud-native environments.
• Strong fundamentals across languages and cloud platforms.
• Experience designing and scaling distributed systems in AWS; Azure is a plus.
• Unit and integration testing practices without a dedicated QA function.
• Fluent English and ability to communicate across teams.

Responsibilities

• Design scalable, reliable backend systems.
• Scope and own problems and initiatives end to end.
• Contribute to architectural decisions and cross-team alignment.
• Drive cross-cutting initiatives with stakeholders across engineering.
• Build and maintain internal tools and infrastructure (AWS, Terraform).
• Own observability, logging and reliability to keep the platform available.
• Share knowledge through code/design reviews and pairing.
• Explore AI-enabled development improvements for the team.

Skills

Backend development

Cloud platforms

Distributed systems

Unit tests

English fluency

Code reviews

AI tooling

Tools

Docker

Terraform

CloudFormation

Kubernetes

GitHub Copilot

Job description

Join the company and shape the future of hospitality techthe company is the world’s most open, API-first property management platform, powering the next generation of hospitality operations. Our modular, AI-powered infrastructure lets hoteliers customise their tech stack, automate routine work and deliver seamless, personalised guest experiences, powered by best-in-class apps and autonomous AI agents that adapt to every stay.

If you’re driven by the idea of making hospitality smarter, more human and powered by cutting-edge technology, we’d love to hear from you.

About the role

You’ll join our Platform team as an individual contributor, working directly with our Platform Lead, who sets Platform’s technical direction. Platform owns infrastructure, developer experience and security foundations for the whole engineering organisation. It’s a small team, so you’ll cover a wide surface area, with no dedicated DevOps or QA function to hand work to.

This is a high-ownership seat. You’ll take on substantial, ambiguous, cross-cutting initiatives, agree the direction with the Platform Lead, then drive them from first analysis through to completion with real autonomy over how you get there.

We don’t run a groomed backlog or sprint planning. We assign a significant topic to someone who owns it end to end. If you thrive with structure handed to you, this isn’t the role. If you love spotting the problem worth solving and driving it yourself, you’ll fit right in.

What you’ll be up to

• Designing and building scalable, reliable and maintainable backend systems.
• Spotting and scoping problems and initiatives yourself, not just picking up assigned tickets: weighing impact, priority and timing.
• Contributing to architectural decisions and design discussions, and bringing other teams along.
• Driving substantial, cross-cutting initiatives end to end, coordinating with stakeholders across engineering.
• Building and maintaining internal tools and infrastructure (AWS, Terraform) that help teams deliver faster and more reliably.
• Owning observability, logging and operational excellence to keep the platform highly available.
• Sharing knowledge through code reviews, design reviews and pairing, and helping raise technical standards.
• Spotting where AI and automation can improve how we build and run software.

Some of the challenges waiting for you

You’ll take ownership of one of these as your first initiative, with no other distractions.

• Solving horizontal write-scaling for our database.
• Modernising our CI/CD pipeline for faster, more reliable delivery.
• Migrating our infrastructure-as-code fully from CloudFormation to Terraform.
• Extracting and reworking common services to get us ready for our next scale level.

What you’ll bring to the team

• 5+ years of backend development experience, with a track record of owning significant technical work from ambiguity through to completion.
• Substantial hands-on ownership of infrastructure, reliability or performance, ideally on a platform or infrastructure team rather than a pure product team.
• Strong engineering fundamentals that transfer across languages and cloud platforms. We care more about how you think than which stack you’ve used.
• Experience designing and scaling distributed systems in cloud-native environments (AWS preferred; strong Azure fundamentals and genuine enthusiasm for the switch work just as well).
• Comfort with containerised services and infrastructure-as-code (Docker, Terraform; CloudFormation exposure is relevant given our current stack).
• Confidence writing your own unit and integration tests, as we don’t have a dedicated QA function.
• A project you can talk about in depth: the problem, what you did and the impact it had.
• Fluent English.

Nice to have

• Direct experience with C# (.NET), PostgreSQL, AWS and ECS or Kubernetes: a great fit, though not a hard requirement if your fundamentals are strong.
• Experience setting up infrastructure-as-code from scratch and working with it day to day, ideally with Terraform, including migrating or consolidating from other approaches (like CloudFormation).
• Experience with Kafka or other event-driven and streaming systems (Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ or SQS are good transferable equivalents).
• Experience owning observability and logging for highly available systems.
• Hands‑on use of AI-assisted development tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor AI, ChatGPT, Amazon CodeWhisperer) and a genuine interest in AI-driven engineering improvement.
• Experience mentoring other engineers, and introducing new technology, like AI tooling, to other teams.

Culture & GrowthWhat We Offer

• An International Team: Work alongside colleagues from over 20 nationalities.
• Growth and Development: 360° feedback reviews, an evolving career framework and an annual learning budget of €1,000+.
• Autonomy and Ownership: Great ideas can come from anywhere. We trust you to make decisions and contribute directly.
• Real Impact: Join a fast-growing scale-up transforming hospitality. From day one, your work drives real impact.
• Fair Pay: Competitive salaries guided by benchmarking data, with recognition for performance and contribution.
• Flexible Work: Work from home, the office or a hybrid mix. We focus on results, not clocking hours.
• Time Off and Wellbeing: 30 days of vacation and an EGYM Wellpass membership.
• Free Public Transport: A fully covered