Staff Software Engineer Platform & Architecture

Summary

Join Wander, a company revolutionizing the short-term rental industry, as a Staff Engineer. You will own the technical architecture of the core platform, setting software excellence standards across multiple product squads. Collaborate with leadership to make foundational decisions impacting business expansion, developer productivity, and guest/homeowner experiences. This role requires experience leading teams through hyper-growth and major platform refactors, transforming monoliths into ecosystems, and building lasting, composable platforms. You will architect the platform, raise engineering standards, mentor engineers, lead cross-functional initiatives, ensure scalability and quality, and champion developer experience. Wander offers a fully remote, async-first culture, competitive salary and equity, comprehensive benefits, and clear promotion paths.

Requirements

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

Responsibilities

• 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

Preferred Qualifications

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

Benefits

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