Java Backend Developer - Guest Experience (all genders)

Are you ready to shape the future of travel tech at scale? We are seeking an exceptional and hungry backend developer to improve the search experience of our guests. We’re among the leading travel tech companies in Europe, growing substantially and sustainably year after year, with a mission to make vacation home booking and hosting decisions stress-free and packed with joy. Our vibrant team of over 600 talented individuals from 60+ countries shares a passion for cutting-edge technology, constant improvement, and creating exceptional experiences for our 50,000 hosts and 100 million website users each year. The Unique Challenge: Unlike typical e-commerce, our platform is built for major traffic swings — surging by up to 10x on weekends or in vacation periods. As a backend developer, you’ll design systems that handle these peaks seamlessly while keeping response times under a second across the entire booking journey. Your future teamYou will be part of the Search Intelligence team within the Guest Experience department, which is responsible for shaping Holidu’s search engine, the core of how users discover their ideal holiday homes.This cross-functional team of backend engineers, data scientists, product manager and an engineering manager work together to improve property ranking for both first-time and returning users. The team focuses on productionizing machine learning models, building reliable and high-performance APIs, and ensuring seamless collaboration with the Discovery team (responsible for list page APIs) and the Conqueror team (managing the user journey through booking).Together, we create fast, intelligent, and user-centered search experiences that directly impact millions of travelers worldwide. Our Tech StackApplication tech stack: Java 21 and Kotlin with spring Boot.Data Infrastructure: Elasticsearch, postgreSQL, redis, S3 and redshift.Cloud & DevOps: AWS, kubernetes, docker, jenkins, git, terraform.Monitoring & Analytics: Sentry, ELK, prometheus, grafana, AWS Cloudwatch, looker, opsGenie, and internally developed technologies. Your role in this journeyWork with your team to design, implement, evolve, and maintain our Java backend services.Take part in the end-to-end development process, from ideation to release and monitoring.Own delivery of features impacting over 100 million users each month.Focus on building clear, well-structured, and highly available APIs for user-facing clients.Ensure all systems and processes are scalable, reliable, and efficient.Identify improvement opportunities, and uphold quality standards.Collaborate with product management and engineering managers to define goals and priorities.Partner with the backend community to drive strategic technology decisions and manage the team’s backlog.Design solutions and provision infrastructure directly in AWS, integrating and maintaining internal resources.Get hands-on with Elasticsearch, maintaining and monitoring our self-managed cluster.Explore Terraform internals to automate and optimize infrastructure. Your backpack is filled withTechnical Expertise3+ years of professional development experience in Java.Experience with developing web (micro)services with Spring Boot, using relational databases and deploying applications in a cloud environment.Experience in optimising data delivery for speed and memory footprint over REST APIs.Experience in designing and developing highly structured RESTful APIs.Experience with technologies such as Airflow, DBT and/or Looker is a great plus.You love coding and building world class products! We do and we hope you share our ambition!Business & Domain KnowledgeAbility to connect technical decisions to business KPIs and department goals.Experience working closely with product and business stakeholders at all levels.Understanding of e-commerce metrics, conversion optimization, and user experience is a plus. Our adventure includesStrategic Impact: Shape the technical direction of a rapidly growing travel tech leader.Technical Excellence: Work with cutting-edge technologies and influence architectural decisions.Leadership Growth: Lead initiatives that impact millions of users and mentor the next generation of engineers.Innovation Culture: Champion bottom-up ideas and drive technical innovation department-wide.Learning & Development: Substantial budget for conferences, courses, and continuous learning.AI-Forward: Join a company embracing the AI revolution with regular meet-ups and knowledge exchanges.Work-Life Balance: Hybrid model (2 days office), 28 vacation days + 10 unpaid, work abroad up to 8 weeks/year.Competitive Package: Above-market compensation benchmarked against leading Munich scale-ups.Growth Story: Be part of an 11-year success story with stable funding and path to profitability. Want to travel with us?Take a peek into our culture on Instagram @lifeatholidu and check out Tech at Holidu to meet the people behind the product. Apply now and let’s make vacation dreams come true – at scale. For external headhunters: we are only working with a selected group of recruitment agencies and are not open to working with new headhunters.