Staff Software Engineer – Platform & Architecture

Position Overview

• Location Type: Remote
• Job Type: Full-Time
• Salary:

Wander is revolutionizing the short-term rental industry by curating the entire guest experience, from smart homes to an intuitive booking platform. Our mission is to help people find their happy place, and our vision is to build the infrastructure that allows people to experience the world. Following our Series B funding, we are in a phase of rapid expansion and are seeking seasoned technical leaders to guide our platform development and cultivate future products.

The Opportunity

As a Staff Engineer at Wander, you will be responsible for the technical architecture of our core platform and setting the standard for software excellence across multiple product squads. You will collaborate closely with product, design, and operations leadership to make foundational decisions that drive new business, enhance developer productivity, and deliver reliable guest and homeowner experiences at scale. This role is ideal for engineers with experience leading teams through hyper-growth, major platform refactors, transforming monoliths into ecosystems, and building scalable, composable platforms.

What You’ll Do

• Architect the Platform: Define and evolve the technical direction for Wander’s booking, pricing, property-ops, and homeowner systems, balancing immediate product needs with long-term flexibility.
• Raise the Engineering Bar: Establish clear patterns for service boundaries, observability, testing, and CI/CD to empower engineers to ship with confidence.
• Mentor & Uplift: Coach staff and senior engineers, conduct design reviews, and model pragmatic, empathetic leadership within 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 in capacity planning, performance tuning, and incident retrospectives as we scale traffic and product offerings.
• Champion Developer Experience: Shape internal platforms, tooling, and documentation to ensure new hires can become productive quickly.

What We’re Looking For

• Proven experience scaling production systems and operating at a Staff level (or higher) for several years.
• Demonstrated success in designing extensible, composable service or plugin architectures that support multiple product lines.
• Deep experience with TypeScript & Node.js, with a polyglot mindset and comfort selecting the best tool for the job (e.g., Go, Rust, Python).
• Mastery of PostgreSQL (or equivalent RDBMS), event-driven patterns (Kafka, NATS, or similar), and cloud-native infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure).
• Track record of embedding observability (structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics) and reliability engineering into daily workflows.
• Comfort with monorepos and designing build pipelines for high-frequency deployments.
• Hands-on experience integrating LLM or AI services into production systems is a strong plus.
• Proven ability to mentor, influence, and communicate effectively through various channels.

What Success Looks Like

• Within 30 days: Author a platform architecture roadmap, gain stakeholder alignment on trade-offs, and initiate a strategic migration.
• By month 3: Become the go-to architect for at least one major domain (e.g., pricing, inventory, homeowner finance) and launch features that scale under peak demand.
• After 6 months: Foster a culture of technical excellence, ensure production stability, and contribute to the design of new product foundations.

Our Tech Stack

• Runtime: Node.js, TypeScript, Fastify
• Data: PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka
• LLM: OpenAI, Gemini, Ant