What are the responsibilities and job description for the Staff Software Engineer position at Harnham?
Staff Software Engineer (Backend / API Platform)
Location: New York City (4 days Hybrid)
Pay: $190,000 - $240,000 Base Equity
No Sponsorship Offered
About the Opportunity
The organization is scaling its platform and seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead the design and development of a mission-critical external API used by partners, third-party distributors, and emerging AI-driven booking channels.
This is a highly impactful individual contributor role focused on transactional systems, inventory management, external integrations, API architecture, reliability, and platform scalability.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and launch a versioned external API supporting pricing, availability, reservations, modifications, and cancellations.
- Develop resilient booking workflows that handle retries, idempotency, reconciliation, timeouts, duplicate requests, and partial failures.
- Own and evolve core booking domain models including inventory, pricing, scheduling, holds, carts, and bookings.
- Design scalable integration patterns for third-party systems, booking partners, POS, and property-management platforms.
- Build extensible platform capabilities that support multiple product categories without requiring separate booking systems.
- Establish observability, monitoring, testing, alerting, and operational best practices for critical booking services.
- Collaborate with engineering, product, and business stakeholders to translate complex requirements into durable platform solutions.
Must-Have Qualifications
- 8 years of software engineering experience building backend or distributed systems.
- Experience designing transactional systems, public APIs, integration platforms, or reservation/commerce platforms.
- Strong understanding of relational databases, concurrency, consistency models, asynchronous workflows, and distributed systems failures.
- Experience evolving production data models and operating high-availability systems at scale.
- Hands-on experience with modern backend technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Node.js, PostgreSQL, REST APIs, and cloud infrastructure. (language-agnostic)
- Strong focus on system reliability, testing, observability, monitoring, and production ownership.
Salary : $190,000 - $240,000