Senior Full Stack Engineer at Hopper - Remote UK — Columbus
Traveler-Friendly Insight
Remote-First with UK Base: This role is tagged #LI-Remote and the benefits package — FlexDesk co-working access, a work-from-home stipend, and Carrot Cash travel credits — strongly signals a location-flexible, remote-first setup. However, the Smart Pension (UK-specific) and Vitality Health insurance indicate this is structured as a UK employment contract, meaning you'll likely need UK residency or right-to-work status rather than pure location independence.
Async vs. Sync Reality: The role involves on-call rotations and incident response for revenue-critical, real-time voice systems. This means some synchronous availability is non-negotiable. Expect core overlap hours with UK/European business times, limiting extreme timezone hopping (e.g., Southeast Asia or Americas) without careful planning.
Nomad Visa Considerations: If you hold UK residency, remote-friendly destinations within Europe (Portugal's D8 digital nomad visa, Spain's digital nomad visa) are accessible for medium-term stays while remaining compliant with your UK employment contract. Destinations like Lisbon or Barcelona offer good coworking infrastructure aligned with CET/WET timezones, easing overlap with UK hours.
- Lisbon: ~£1,800–2,200/mo comfortable living — very viable on a senior UK tech salary
- Bangkok: Timezone gap (GMT+7) may conflict with on-call; lower cost ~£1,000–1,400/mo
- Medellín: GMT-5 creates significant overlap challenges for a UK-anchored role
The Carrot Cash travel stipend is a genuine perk for travel-minded engineers — check with Hopper whether it applies to personal travel bookings.
About the Role
HTS Assist is Hopper's agentic AI assistant for travel, resolving flight changes, cancellations, refunds, and bookings over chat and voice for some of the world's largest travel brands. We're looking for a senior full stack engineer to anchor this product, owning the realtime and voice layer end to end while building across React/TypeScript front ends, Scala and Python services, and cloud infrastructure. The team is lean and senior, ownership is broad, and the path from your code to a traveler's phone call is short.
What Would Your Day-to-Day Look Like
- Own the voice channel end to end, including telephony and CPaaS integrations (e.g., Twilio, Amazon Connect), streaming speech-to-text and text-to-speech pipelines, realtime model orchestration, and latency and quality budgets
- Build product features across the stack, including web chat front ends in React/TypeScript, backend services in Scala and Python, and infrastructure on GCP
- Design for multi-tenant scale, with one codebase serving many partners through configuration rather than forks
- Build the safety and compliance plumbing enterprise partners audit, including guardrails, content filtering, and PII redaction integration points
- Keep revenue-critical deployments healthy through observability, alerting, incident response, and SLA performance
- Build the platform capabilities forward-deployed engineers configure for partner telephony integrations and go-lives
- Raise the engineering bar through code review, architecture reviews, and mentoring
An Ideal Candidate Has
- 6+ years of software engineering experience, with senior-level ownership of production systems and genuine full-stack range
- Hands-on realtime systems experience, such as voice applications, WebRTC/SIP, streaming media, or comparable low-latency products
- Strength in a modern front end (React, TypeScript) and depth on the backend (Scala or another JVM language, and/or Python), along with cloud infrastructure experience on GCP or AWS
- A track record designing, building, and maintaining RESTful APIs, microservices, or event-driven systems
- Familiarity using AI coding tools as a standard part of their workflow, with the judgment to review, correct, and own everything that ships
- An operable-systems mindset, covering SLAs, observability, on-call rotations, and rollback plans
- The ability to break down complex problems, make pragmatic tradeoffs, and ship iteratively, backed by strong communication across product, design, and operations
- Bonus: Conversational AI or LLM orchestration experience, including speech technologies such as Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Whisper, or OpenAI Realtime
- Bonus: Working knowledge of cloud telephony or CPaaS platforms such as Twilio, Amazon Connect, Genesys, or LiveKit
- Bonus: Experience building customer service, CRM, contact center, or workflow automation tools
- Familiarity with travel industry technologies (PSS/GDS, hotel PMS/CRS) is a plus, though not required
Perks and Benefits of Working With Us
- Well-funded and proven startup with large ambitions, competitive salary, upsides of pre-IPO equity packages
- Hopper covers 100% of the premiums for the employee for a group insurance plan through Vitality Health
- Automatic contributions when you start with Hopper through Smart Pension
- Please ask us about our very generous parental leave, much above industry standards
- Access to co-working space on demand through FlexDesk and a work-from-home stipend
- Carrot Cash travel stipend
- Unlimited PTO
- Entrepreneurial culture where pushing limits and taking risks is everyday business
- Open communication with management and company leadership
- Small, dynamic teams, massive impact
About Hopper
At Hopper, we are on a mission to become the leading travel platform globally, powering Hopper's mobile app, website and our B2B business, HTS (Hopper Technology Solutions). By leveraging massive amounts of data and advanced machine learning algorithms, Hopper combines its world-class travel agency offering with proprietary fintech products to bring transparency, flexibility and savings to travelers globally.
The Hopper platform serves hundreds of millions of travelers globally and continues to capture market share around the world. The Hopper app has been downloaded over 120 million times and has become largely popular among younger travelers, with 70% of its users being Gen Z and millennials.
Through HTS, our B2B division, the company supercharges its partners' direct channels by integrating our fintech products on their sites or powering end-to-end travel portals. Today, our partners include leading travel brands like Capital One, Nubank, Air Canada, and many more.
Here are just a few stats that demonstrate the company's recent growth:
- Billions of dollars worth of travel and travel fintech are sold through Hopper and HTS' channels every year.
- Our fintech products, including Cancel for Any Reason and Flight Disruption Assistance, have exceptionally strong CSAT because the terms are always clear, and customers receive instant, no-questions-asked resolutions.
- Almost 30% of our app customers purchase at least one fintech product when making a booking, and consumers are 1.6x more likely to repurchase if they add fintech to their booking versus if they booked just travel.
- Given the success of its fintech products, Hopper launched a B2B initiative, HTS (Hopper Technology Solutions), which represents more than 75% of the business.
Through HTS, any travel provider (airlines, hotels, banks, travel agencies, etc.) can integrate and seamlessly distribute Hopper's fintech or travel inventory on their direct channels. Hopper has been named the #1 most innovative company in travel by Fast Company, downloaded over 120 million times, and is now the #3 largest online travel agency in North America. Hopper has raised over $750 million USD of private capital and is backed by some of the largest institutional investors and banks in the world.
Come take off with us!
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