Principle Software Engineer

Working at Luxury Escapes

Luxury Escapes is one of the world’s fastest-growing travel websites, with over 8 million members, recently winning the National Travel Industry Award for Most Outstanding Online Travel Agency! 

Our mission is to delight our customers with incredible deals for the world's best holidays. We are a collective of forward-thinking people, driven to challenge the travel industry and ourselves to bring outstanding travel experiences to our customer community.

Our Sydney office is on Kent Street - a short walk from Wynyard station and close to great cafes in Barangaroo.

** Luxury Escapes is an in-person company. We work and collaborate together, face to face in our Barangaroo office.**

About the Accommodation Team 

The Accommodation team sits at the very core of the Luxury Escapes business. We build solutions to integrate third parties into our hotel booking engine and deliver real-time availability and pricing to users across all our customer channels. It's an exciting space with a never-ending list of challenges to tackle. 

Upcoming projects include: 

• Rearchitecting our core accommodation platform: Establishing the foundations to support our roadmap for the next 4–5 years. 
• V2 of the hotel engine: Instant pricing and availability for hundreds of thousands of hotels worldwide. 
• Wholesale: Building systems to on-sell our hotels to other online travel agents. 
• International Expansion: Scaling our systems to match our global growth. 

What You'll Do: 

• Drive the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for the Accommodation team. 
• Serve as a thought leader, guiding technology choices and ensuring alignment with industry trends. 
• Lead large-scale system design initiatives, ensuring scalability, reliability, and security. 
• Solve the hardest technical challenges, collaborating with multiple teams and wrangling high volumes of data. 
• Act as a mentor and role model, fostering a high-performing engineering culture. 
• Champion engineering best practices, performance optimization, and software quality. 
• Conduct in-depth code and architecture reviews to ensure technical excellence. 
• Influence company-wide technology strategies, making key architectural decisions. 
• Contribute hands-on coding, ensuring high code quality and adherence to best practices. 

Relevant Skills: 

• Extensive experience with server-side programming languages (JavaScript/TypeScript preferred). 
• Expertise in distributed systems, cloud computing, and microservices architecture. 
• Strong background in database design, scaling, and performance tuning (PostgreSQL preferred). 
• Deep knowledge of system security, DevOps, and automation. 
• Strong leadership, communication, and strategic thinking skills. 
• Experience working in high-scale, real-time systems and optimizing performance. 
• Experience working with distributed caches that manage highly dynamic and parameterized data, requiring sophisticated invalidation strategies. 
• Experience handling high request volumes and optimizing system performance. 

Our Perks & Benefits: 

• Excellent remuneration package. 
• 20% discount on luxury holidays and experiences. 
• Breakfast and lunch provided five days a week. 
• Health and well-being programs. 
• A super collaborative team that enjoys creating great platforms. 

If you’re interested in the role but don't check every box, apply anyway—we’d love to hear from you! 

(...being Sydney-based that is the only box is non-negotiable)

We embrace diversity in our people and make hiring decisions based on your experiences and skills. We do not discriminate based on gender identity, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability status. You'll find a collaborative, inclusive, and respectful workplace here at Luxury Escapes, and we are proud to celebrate who you are. Please let us know if you require any reasonable adjustments during the interview.

We are a 2025 Circle Back Initiative Employer, committing to responding to every applicant.