What are the responsibilities and job description for the Django Developer position at The Cruise Brothers?
Django Developer (Python / Backend)
Cruise Brothers · Warwick, RI or Palm Beach Gardens, FL · Hybrid · Remote considered · Full-time
Cruise Brothers is a family-owned travel company, in business since 1972 and one of the largest cruise agencies in the country. We'll sell over $250 million in cruises this year — and we run the whole business on software we build ourselves.
It's called CBAT: Django on PostgreSQL with Vue on the front. CRM, bookings, commissions, double-entry accounting, messaging and SMS, automation, and agent training for nearly 10,000 independent travel agents. Four people build it. We're hiring the fifth.
You'd be our backend developer, working alongside our front-end developer as the pair that keeps the platform moving — you on models, views, APIs, and business logic; them on templates, JavaScript, and Vue. Real features, real users: the people using what you build are on the phone with customers all day, and you'll hear about it either way.
What you'd do
- Backend features across bookings, commissions, agent management, messaging, and reporting
- API endpoints and integrations with outside travel systems — cruise booking engines, vendor feeds, payment and SMS providers
- A hook and automation platform (model events fire hooks, hooks drive LLM agents) that needs a second pair of hands
- Modernizing a mature codebase as a steady drumbeat, not a doomed big-bang — per-model folders, query logic onto QuerySets, one mutation primitive per operation, and CI ratchets that keep the drift from coming back
- Own tickets end to end: reproduce, fix, test, ship
- Growing into ownership of a specific slice of the platform
What we're looking for
- 4 years building production web applications with Python and Django — or comparable experience in another mature framework (Rails, Laravel, Spring, ASP.NET) and a real appetite for moving to Django
- Comfortable in a large, established codebase — you can find your way around code you didn't write
- Solid on relational data modeling and PostgreSQL
- Enough front-end (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) to finish your own features — we have a dedicated front-end developer, but you shouldn't be blocked on them
- You read documentation before asking, and you verify AI-generated code before shipping it
- Nice to have: payments, accounting systems, travel, telephony/SMS, or anything with money in the database
If you've worked in a large, long-lived Django codebase and have opinions about how it should be modernized, we'd especially like to talk.
We're open on experience level. A strong mid-level developer who wants room to grow and a senior developer who wants a real codebase to improve are both good outcomes here, and we'll fit the offer to the person.
How we work
Most of our code is written in Claude Code sessions, backed by automated conformity checks, 30-way parallel testing, migration linting, and automated review on every pull request — the tooling exists so that moving fast doesn't mean shipping slop. If you've wanted to work this way for real, this is the place.
Fifteen years of platform knowledge is written down in a documentation system built to get you productive in your first week.
Four developers, direct access to the CTO and the leadership team.
Where
Warwick, Rhode Island or Palm Beach Gardens, Florida — hybrid, a couple of days a week in the office to start and easing off as you get established, flexible about which days.
Our development team sits in Rhode Island. Palm Beach Gardens is home to our sales and marketing teams, who are the people using what you build every day — if you're based there, you'd sit with them and would naturally take on more of that side of the platform.
We'd also consider fully remote for a genuine Django expert. One of our engineers is already fully remote and it works well, so if you're deep in Django and nowhere near either office, apply anyway and say so.
Benefits
- Healthcare
- Unlimited PTO
- 401(k) with a 6% company match
- Travel perks — we're a cruise company
Apply
Send your resume to jobs@cruisebrothers.com, along with a link to anything you'd like us to look at and a sentence or two about the most interesting thing you've shipped.
Pay: From $115,000.00 per year
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Warwick, RI 02886
Salary : $115,000