The role
Senior Software Engineer
About Tripadvisor
The Tripadvisor Group connects people to experiences worth sharing, and aims to be the world’s most trusted source for travel and experiences. We leverage our brands, technology, and capabilities to connect our global audience with partners through rich content, travel guidance, and two-sided marketplaces for experiences, accommodations, restaurants, and other travel categories. The subsidiaries of Tripadvisor, Inc. (Nasdaq: TRIP), include a portfolio of travel brands and businesses, including Tripadvisor, Viator, and TheFork.
Tripadvisor Experiences Engineering is the team that builds and supports the world's leading marketplace for travel experiences. We believe that making memories is what travel is all about. And with 400,000+ travel experiences to explore—everything from simple tours to extreme adventures (and everything in between) —making memories that will last a lifetime has never been easier.
About the Role
We are looking for a product-focused Senior Software Engineer to join our Experiences Engineering team. This is a full-stack role, leveraging Java, SQL, React, AWS and AI tools. It suits "T-shaped" engineers who thrive on autonomy and technical leadership. You’ll build and maintain highly scalable distributed systems that power travel experiences for millions of users globally.
We embrace flexibility in where and how work gets done and also value meaningful in-person moments to connect and collaborate. You can expect a remote-first working model with periodic in-person gatherings at your closest office for team connection, planning, or other key moments. This position is open to candidates based within a commutable distance (generally up to 1.5 hours) of one of our office hubs in London, Oxford, Krakow or Lisbon.
What You’ll Do
- Lead Technical Design: Own features end-to-end, leading the design and implementation of highly visible features while balancing security, privacy, and performance.
- Translate Strategy to Action: Work with Product and Data partners to turn high-level business goals into clear technical specifications, often serving as the technical lead for multi-quarter initiatives.
- Elevate the Team: Set the bar for code quality, lead the adoption of review standards, and mentor junior and mid-level engineers.
- Master Agentic AI: Use AI tools as a strategic partner to plan approaches, decompose ambiguous work, and establish new standards for monitoring and reliability.
- Architect for Resilience: Define the operational strategy and design highly fault-tolerant architectures, proactively identifying structural risks and setting the team-wide standards for automation, monitoring, and long-term stability.
- Optimize Systems: Actively look for opportunities to simplify, consolidate, or retire legacy code to reduce complexity and increase team velocity.
Skills & Experience
We typically look for 5+ years’ experience, following a Bachelor’s degree or above in Comp Science or a related field.
- Distributed Systems Expertise: Deep understanding of concurrent programming and experience building high-performance, scalable backend systems in cloud environments.
- Analytical Mindset: A habit of asking "how will we know this worked?" and using operational data or experiment results to validate every significant technical decision.
- Full-Stack Proficiency: Strong experience in at least one modern backend language (e.g., Java, C#, Go, Python) and familiarity with modern front-end frameworks.
- AI Coding: you are fluent coding with either Cursor or Codex/Claude/Open Code.
- Navigating Ambiguity: Comfortable making rational tradeoffs between non-functional requirements and delivery speed in an evolving environment.
- Collaborative Leadership: Proven ability to build relationships across disciplines and communicate technical trade-offs to non-technical partners.
We’d love to see experience with NoSQL databases, GraphQL, Kafka, or containerization (Docker/Kubernetes). Experience building tools or abstractions that provide leverage to an entire engineering team is also a significant plus. We don’t expect you to know everything on day one. More than any specific tool, we value curiosity and the ability to solve problems creatively.
We value engineers from different technical backgrounds. You can complete our coding interview exercises in any language of your choice, but need to be open to working within the Java ecosystem when you join!
What We Offer
- Competitive compensation packages, including base salary, annual bonus, and more.
- “Work your way” with flexibility to suit your lifestyle. We take a remote-friendly approach to collaboration, with the option to join on-site as often as you’d like in select locations.
- Flexible schedule. Work-life balance is ingrained in our culture by design. Trust and accountability make it work.
- Donation matching. Give back? Give more! We match qualifying charitable donations annually.
- Tuition assistance. Want to level up your career? We love to hear it! Receive annual support for qualified programs.
- Lifestyle benefit. An annual benefit to spend on yourself. Use it on travel, wellness, or whatever suits you.
- Travel perks. We believe that travel is employee development, so we provide discounts and more.
- Employee assistance program. We’re here for you with resources and programs to help you through life’s challenges.
- Health benefits. We offer great coverage and competitive premiums.
- Generous referral scheme. Help us grow and be rewarded with generous awards for referring successful candidates.
Our Cultural Pillars:
- Traveller first: We exist to create value for our customer, the traveler. We enable our suppliers and partners to unlock this value. Their collective behaviors and insights are what drives us.
- Execution is our edge: We act fast, experiment, learn from failure, iterate, and improve the solutions of tomorrow across every aspect of our business. Our execution is agile, data-driven, prioritised, and built to scale. We assume no problem is someone else’s problem and finish what can be done today, knowing tomorrow will bring fresh challenges.
- We succeed together: The best outcomes are driven by empathic, humble, and diverse subject matter experts working toward shared goals. We collaborate relentlessly, challenge assumptions, give actionable feedback, and set each other up for success through empowered teams with a clear charter. We transparently take ownership of our growth, individually and as a team. We celebrate the quality of our effort, our learnings, and our collective achievements.
Discover more in our Tech Blog, for an inside look into some of our exciting and ground-breaking technical projects here at Tripadvisor Group.
Tripadvisor Group champions the unique identities, abilities, and experiences of all our people – employees, customers, and partners. This stems from our belief in the transformative power of travel, dining, and experiences to connect us and open doors to worlds very different from our own. Our ED&I strategy shapes how we approach our people, culture, business, and reputation. Tripadvisor Group strives to embed inclusion and belonging across all our brands.
We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please make sure to reach out to your individual recruiter or our team at AccessibleRecruiting@tripadvisor.com.
If you have any additional questions about careers at Tripadvisor you can email us at recruitment@tripadvisor.com. We have all the answers!