
Senior Backend Engineer - Travel Product at ShopBack (Shenzhen, China)
ShopBack· Shenzhen, China·
Role details
Job description
Our Journey The ShopBack Group is Asia-Pacific’s leading shopping, rewards, and payments platform, serving over 20 million active members across 13 markets. In 2025, the Group continued its global growth with its expansion into North America. Driven by the vision to make every day more rewarding, ShopBack is dedicated to saving members money and time, and delivering delight every day. The platform also enables merchants and brands to engage with their members in a cost-effective manner. Founded in 2014, ShopBack now powers over US$5.5 billion in annual sales for over 20,000 online and in-store partners, and has rewarded shoppers with more than US$900 million (over S$1 billion) in Cashback to date. Through its innovative offerings, ShopBack continues to create value for both members and merchants. Notably, its payment solution, ShopBack Pay, offers members a convenient and rewarding payment option at checkout.
Your Adventure Ahead
- Lead and deliver large‑scale travel platform components such as flight/hotel search, pricing/availability aggregation, booking flows, or content systems.
- Contribute to ideation, technical design, implementation, and testing of high‑impact travel product features.
- Design and build robust, scalable distributed systems capable of handling real‑time travel inventory and pricing.
- Architect clean, well‑structured APIs used by client applications for search, booking, and trip management.
- Collaborate closely with Product, Data, and UX teams to shape the future of the ShopBack Travel experience.
- Work with external partners (OTAs, GDS, suppliers) to integrate APIs, understand domain constraints, and improve reliability.
- Drive engineering best practices, mentor other engineers, and elevate technical standards within the team.
- Analyze complex requirements, propose pragmatic solutions, and articulate trade-offs clearly.
Essentials to Succeed
- 7+ years of experience building consumer‑facing platforms or distributed backend systems.
- Travel / OTA experience strongly preferred. Ideal candidates have prior experience working within the travel or OTA ecosystem — such as flight metasearch, hotel aggregation, activity marketplaces, travel content platforms, or GDS/LCC/API integrations — and understand the complexities of pricing, availability, and supplier systems.
- Experience with flight or hotel domains is a strong advantage: availability, fare rules, rates & inventory, ranking/relevance, caching strategy, or booking orchestration.
- Hands-on experience working with Node.js (preferred) or other backend technologies.
- Experience deploying applications into cloud environments (AWS highly desirable).
- Strong understanding of API design, microservices, and event-driven architecture.
- Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, complex technical environment with high ambiguity.
- Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across engineering, product, and third-party partners.
- Demonstrated use of Generative AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude) to develop new or improve workflows, enhance productivity, and drive efficiency at scale
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field
Technologies We Use & Love
- Cloud: AWS
- Infra: Kubernetes
- Programming languages: NodeJS / Typescript
- Relational database: Postgres
- Message queue: Kafka, SQS
- Continuous Integration: Gitlab
- Monitoring: DataDog
- Big Data: Redshift, Spark, S3, etc.
- Communication: Slack
- Project Management: JIRA / Confluence
- Other technologies:
- Knative Eventing / Serving
- Debezium + Kafka Connect
ShopBacker Traits Agency - We take ownership and act, rather than waiting for permission. When something's blocking progress, we find a way through it and follow through until it's done. Judgement - We aim for high-impact decisions, not just easy wins, and we put the bigger picture ahead of individual interests. That means moving quickly and confidently, while staying thoughtful about when a call really matters. Learning Velocity - We pick up new skills fast and let go of old habits just as quickly when something better comes along. We benchmark ourselves against the best and keep raising our own bar. Tenacity - We stay in it when things get hard, keeping a level head under pressure. We debate openly before deciding, then commit fully — and support each other along the way.
What's in it for ShopBackers
Career growth opportunities to take on greater challenges that help you realise your ambitions. Be part of a winning team on a journey to global scale. Competitive compensation based on performance. Candid, open, and collaborative culture where feedback is valued.
Why work at ShopBack
- High-Impact Scale: Employees work on products used by 50 million shoppers across 13 markets, processing over half a million daily transactions—real scale with tangible impact.
- Global & Diverse Teams: Engineering, product, data, and commercial teams are distributed across Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Australia, China, and the US, offering a multicultural work environment.
- Innovation & AI Focus: The company is actively building AI-powered features, presenting opportunities for engineers and data scientists to work on cutting-edge consumer tech.
- Hybrid & Flexible Work: Some roles (e.g., Assistant Marketing Manager in Sydney) are hybrid. Roles in Austin, Texas offer relocation support. Internships are often on-site (e.g., Shenzhen).
- Culture: Rated 4.0/5.0 for culture on LinkedIn (567 reviews), indicating a generally positive internal culture. The company emphasizes being “adventurous” and “driven.”
- Career Growth: With recent US expansion and ongoing scaling, there are opportunities for rapid career progression. The company has hired talent from top regional tech firms (Shopee, Grab, Lazada, ByteDance).
- Perks: Real cashback for employees (a natural perk of the product), plus standard benefits for a late-stage growth company in Singapore.