Principal Engineer

NOTE: This is a FULLY remote role but the candidate must be within the European 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 European 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.

Profitable high-growth and the first short-term rental PMS unicorn 🦄. Join us at our most exciting stage yet! Learn more about our recent valuation and story 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

• Familiarity with transitioning event-driven service-oriented architectures by applying Domain Driven Design (DDD) principles

• 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.

What we offer

• Competitive Compensation: We offer competitive pay based on market rates in the country of the applicant.

• 100% Remote: Enjoy the freedom to work from anywhere within your country of residence—be it a co-working space your home office or even your dining room table. The choice is yours. Just don’t ask to work in our office (we don’t have one).

• Equity: Every role in our company comes with valuable stock options in a fast-growing and profitable company. This ensures we all share in the company’s success.

• Values-Driven Leadership: Our Core Values are not just words we’ve written to make us feel good. We leverage them daily when making strategic and tactical decisions.

• Professional Growth: Our rapid growth offers unparalleled learning and development opportunities along with a multitude of career advancement opportunities.

• Annual Paid Leave: The specific amounts vary by country and are aligned with country and/or contract-specific norms.

• Geographic Specific Benefits: As an international employer we offer different country-specific benefits such as Health Insurance and Pensions in countries where these perks are customary. The specifics depend on the country of the applicant.

• Dynamic Team Culture: As a global company with team members in over 40 countries our diverse and international culture fuels our innovation and creativity providing a key pillar to our success (and making it a lot of fun to work here).

Thank you for your interest. If you apply for this role you will receive an email from our Talent Acquisition team after your application has been reviewed alongside the qualifications for this role and the qualifications of others who have applied.