Staff Software Engineer, Wander
Platform & Architecture
+ Equity
Luxury vacation rental & vacation homes
Open for applications
Luxury vacation rental & vacation homes
201-500 employees
Open for applications
+ Equity
201-500 employees
Company mission
To help people find their happy place and build the infrastructure to experience the world.
Role
Who you are
- This role is tailor-made for engineers who have led teams through hyper-growth and major platform refactors, led teams through explosive growth, turned monoliths into ecosystems, and built composable platforms that last
- You’ve repeatedly scaled production systems and have operated at Staff level (or higher) for several years
- Demonstrated success designing extensible, composable service or plugin architectures that served multiple product lines
- Deep experience with TypeScript & Node.js (our primary language) plus a polyglot mindset and comfortable choosing the right tool for the job – Go, Rust, Python, or others when TypeScript isn’t the best fit
- Mastery of PostgreSQL (or equivalent RDBMS), event‑driven patterns (Kafka, NATS, or similar), and cloud‑native infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure)
- Track record embedding observability (structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics) and reliability engineering into everyday workflows
- Comfort running monorepos and designing build pipelines that support hundreds of daily deploys
- Hands-on experience integrating LLM or AI services into production systems is a strong plus
- Proven ability to mentor, influence, and communicate – whether in design docs, Slack threads, or synchronous deep‑dives
What the job involves
- As a Staff Engineer at Wander you will own the technical architecture of our core platform and set the standard for software excellence across multiple product squads.
- You’ll work elbow‑to‑elbow with product, design, and operations leadership to make foundational decisions that unlock new lines of business, accelerate developer productivity, and deliver reliable guest and homeowner experiences at scale
- Architect the Platform. Define and evolve the technical north star for Wander’s booking, pricing, property‑ops, and homeowner systems – balancing immediate product needs with long‑term flexibility
- Raise the Engineering Bar. Drive clear patterns for service boundaries, observability, testing, and CI/CD that enable engineers to ship with confidence
- Mentor & Uplift. Coach staff and senior engineers, run design reviews, and model pragmatic, empathetic leadership in 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 through capacity planning, performance tuning, and incident retrospectives as we 10x traffic and double our product surface
- Champion Developer Experience. Shape internal platforms, tooling, and documentation so that every new hire can be productive within their first week
- Within 30 days you have authored a platform architecture roadmap, rallied stakeholders around trade‑offs, and landed your first strategic migration
- By month 3 you are the go‑to architect for at least one major domain (e.g., pricing, inventory, homeowner finance) and have launched features that scale gracefully under peak demand
- After 6 months you have built a culture of technical excellence where other engineers feel supported, production incidents are non-existent, and new products launch on a foundation you helped design
Our take
While AirBnB disrupted the hotel and hospitality industries, the novelty has worn off. Surprise fees, sub-par cleaning, uncomfortable beds and unreliable photos are just some of the factors which have taken the shine off the sharing economy model. Built as a response to these issues, Wander aims to return the luxury to the vacation and short stay sector.
Wander provides a tech-first approach to letting short stays that might be familiar to anyone using AirBnB or another competitor, but the comparisons stop there. Wander directly owns and controls the properties on its portfolio, allowing it to ensure a high standard of quality and excellent customer service for its guests.
After raising an impressive amount of capital, Wander has secured a significant credit facility from Credit Suisse. It will use this to increase its property portfolio across the United States with an aim to put a property within 3 hours drive of 80% of the population. It is also rolling out a facility to allow guests to purchase part ownership of the homes they stay in, allowing them to diversify their own financial portfolios. With this approach, Wander is in a strong position to capture a large segment of the luxury market.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
29% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
May 2025
$50m
SERIES B
Jun 2022
$5m
EARLY VC
Total funding: $82m
Company HQ
Civic District, Austin, TX
Leadership
John Andrew Entwistle
(Founder & CEO)Previously Co-Founder & CEO of Coder. Before that was Fellow at The Thiel Foundation.
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