Staff Backend Software Engineer – OpenAPI team
Plusgrade
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Hybrid
Location: Montreal • Canada
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Job Level
About the role
- You’ll act as the technical lead for your team.
- You will own the full lifecycle of our new APIs, from design and versioning to rollout, deprecation, and continuous improvement, with a clear focus on reliability, performance, and partner experience.
- You’ll collaborate with Product and Partner Success to shape the OpenAPI roadmap, balancing new capabilities with platform hardening and scalability.
- Over 12–18 months, your impact will be visible in stronger partner adoption, higher API reliability, and faster time-to-integration for OTAs and TMCs.
- You will define and evolve the architecture of our OpenAPI platform, ensuring it scales to support new products, partners, and traffic levels.
- Establish and champion API design standards (OpenAPI specifications, versioning, backward compatibility) across teams building on the Indirect Booking Ecosystem.
- Lead complex, cross-team initiatives such as shared libraries, common integration patterns, and reliability improvements that span multiple services and squads.
- Own key non-functional outcomes for our APIs, including latency, availability, error rates, and partner integration success.
- Partner directly with OTAs and TMCs’ technical teams to understand their needs, guide integrations, and turn their feedback into improvements to our platform and documentation.
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional experience designing and building scalable software solutions in an Agile/Scrum environment.
- Proven experience leading technical discussions and driving decisions that balance delivery speed, maintainability, and long-term system health.
- Deep understanding of Java (Spring Boot), cloud deployments (preferably AWS), and distributed system design.
- A strong understanding of testing and the test pyramid, as well as pipelines and feedback loops, with a focus on quality delivery (JUnit, Mockito).
- Solid computer science fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, system design, and performance optimization.
- Extensive experience designing and evolving public- or partner-facing APIs, ideally using OpenAPI/Swagger, with a strong focus on usability, consistency, and backward compatibility.
- Hands-on experience with API platforms and integration patterns (e.g., API gateways, OAuth2, API keys, rate limiting, webhooks vs. polling, idempotency, resiliency patterns).
- Proven track record leading multi-team or multi-service architectural initiatives, such as API redesigns, large refactors, or migrations in distributed systems.
- Experience working directly with external partners’ or enterprise customers’ engineering teams to deliver integrations or platform capabilities.
- Travel, airline, e-commerce, or other highly regulated domain experience is a plus, especially if you’ve worked with complex transactional systems.
- Demonstrated experience mentoring developers, performing code reviews, and improving team velocity and quality metrics.
- A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
Benefits
- RRSP/401(k) matching
- Comprehensive health plans
- Flexible paid time off
- Annual upgrade credit
- Annual physical wellness credit
- Annual mental wellness credit
- Flexibility to work remotely
- Parental leave top-up
- Adventure Pass
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard Skills & Tools
JavaSpring BootOpenAPISwaggerJUnitMockitoAPI designdistributed system designcloud deploymentsAgile
Soft Skills
technical leadershipcollaborationmentoringcommunicationdecision makingproblem solvingteam velocity improvementquality metrics enhancementcross-team initiative leadershippartner integration guidance