Senior Software Engineer (Full-Stack)

Rocket Travel is looking for Senior Full-Stack Software Engineers who have experience with both backend and frontend experience to join our growing global engineering team.

Today, we're a hybrid team headquartered out of Chicago's West Loop, with team members spread out across the globe from the domestic locales of Vermont to Florida, Brazil to Bangalore to Bangkok.

At Rocket, we encourage experimentation, so we're not a one language/framework shop. We hire people who know how to pick the right tool for the job and learn along the way.  Currently we work with C#, Scala, Groovy, Kotlin on the backend and Typescript / React on our frontend, with a private cloud powered by five global data centers as well as Amazon AWS for some products.  

We expect you to be comfortable picking up backend, frontend, infrastructure, or testing work but are happy to provide time to learn and grow in these various areas as no one is a master of all things.

• Work with a group of intrinsically motivated people with a track record for building successful new businesses from scratch.
• Embody curiosity, community, and accountability. We live and build products by these values every day. 
• Own decisions and take action that can be implemented in a matter of days (or hours).
• Get inspired and encouraged to vacation faster, with an annual vacation stipend.
• Receive a competitive compensation package, including bonus, 401k with match, flexible vacation time, maternity and paternity benefits, health, and dental insurance.
• Total Compensation is based on experience - Salary: $120k - $170k & Bonus: 10% - 20% 
• Can have the option to work remotely. Though we have great offices in Chicago’s West Loop and in NYC’s Empire State building, we have a hybrid team, a flexible work environment, and we welcome full-time remote applicants!
• Share your passion for travel with equally adventurous teammates. 
• Work within the largest online travel company in the world. Rocket Travel creates B2C and B2B2C travel products and is part of Booking Holdings (BKNG). We have many worldwide partners and a diversified business. Despite the world’s current situation, Booking Holdings has been rated the healthiest company in travel, and Rocket itself is already seeing travel demand surpass pre-pandemic levels

• Be involved in all facets of the software development lifecycle, from inception to deployment.
• Grow and develop your toolset in all aspects of software engineering - frontend skills in React, backend skills in the JVM, continuous integration and deployment, testing, security, privacy and DevOps.
• Evolve the Rocket toolkit by identifying and recommending the best tool for each task.
• Improve existing code to make it more testable, tested, and resilient.
• Use data to identify potential bottlenecks in our applications and processes.
• Work closely with other companies within our Group and get exposure to many highly available, scalable APIs that power some of the world's biggest travel brands.
• Deploy daily to highly-available applications.
• Maintain customer empathy and quickly solve pain points for customer's problems.
• Add visibility to critical applications and processes.
• Learn to write end to end tests for critical application code.
• Create A/B tests to bring our users a constantly improving experience.

At Rocket Travel, we’re building a diverse team that values accountability, curiosity, and community. If you share these values and are interested in joining us, we’d love to talk with you even if you don’t meet 100% of the requirements listed here. We don’t expect anyone to have all the answers, as long as they’re willing to learn and grow with us.

• You have at least 5 years of professional working experience
• You have a deep understanding of C# or Scala or another JVM language such as Kotlin, Java or Groovy.
• You have a strong understanding of Javascript fundamentals.
• You have experience working with an application deployed in production with customer traffic using React or another modern SPA library/framework (Vue, Svelte, Angular etc).
• You have a strong understanding of algorithms and data structures.
• You communicate proactively, clearly and effectively. We prefer over communication and helping each other out to quietly struggling away from the team.
• You have deployed applications to via cloud providers like AWS, GCP, Azure or private clouds, and have experience with monitoring & observability in a microservice architecture
• You are passionate about:
• sharing ownership and product direction for our customer-facing products or internal applications.
• learning and helping your teammates learn.
• how your code translates into a better customer experience.
• testing, and have done backend or frontend unit and integration tests.
• You are familiar with agile software engineering methodologies.

We make travel more rewarding than anyone else 

Rocket Travel awards customers for booking travel through our products, allowing people to earn or use loyalty benefits from their favorite loyalty programs.

Our journey

We began in 2013 with the same goal of making travel even more rewarding. This started with our bespoke Rocketmiles website, earning travelers their favorite airline loyalty miles for hotel bookings, and every year since, we’ve advanced our goal.

We now partner with over 60 loyalty programs that travelers can choose from, we build unique partner-branded travel sites, we offer the ability to earn and redeem loyalty rewards, we sit within Booking Holdings—the most experienced Group of travel companies in the world—and we continually grow the number of ways that people can book travel through us, from stays to cars and more.

Travel constantly evolves, opening additional opportunities to create rewarding experiences, and we intend to be at the forefront of building and innovating on those for travelers worldwide.

A diverse and global team

Our teammates work across the globe, in person and remotely. We have offices in Chicago, NYC, Bangkok, Bogota, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and Cebu. No matter where people work, our main team-building goal is to create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment. We do that with a Diversity and Inclusion Committee, setting DEI hiring goals, investing in employee retention, and conducting regular team training that fosters collaboration and morale.

All of these efforts help ensure that we’re promoting a supportive workplace, where people are motivated to grow professionally and build rewarding travel experiences together. 

Note on general employment requirements

Candidates should be authorized to accept employment in the US from any employer, should be willing to start within three weeks of accepting an offer, and should be able to work the same daily working hours as our Chicago office.

A final word

If the idea of working within an environment that promotes accountability, curiosity, and community to build reward travel products sounds motivating to you, we would love to hear from you—even if you’re unable to meet 100% of the job requirements. We never expect people to have all of the answers, as long as they’re willing and able to learn and grow with us.