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Despegar, a 25+ year-old travel platform revolutionizing the travel experience across Latin America, is seeking a Backend Engineer to join the SOFIA team—their AI-powered conversational and booking platform. This is a high-impact role where you'll own the full lifecycle of backend services that power conversational AI and travel experiences.
Key Responsibilities:
- Design, build, and evolve backend services powering SOFIA's conversational and purchase experiences
- Participate in technical architecture decisions with focus on scalability, flexibility, and rapid iteration in a dynamic environment
- Own solutions end-to-end: design, development, deployment, maintenance, and production impact
- Integrate internal services and external APIs to build complete user experiences within the travel ecosystem
- Actively contribute to AI capabilities evolution, collaborating on prompt design, tools, and conversational flows
- Ensure code quality through clean, maintainable, product-oriented solutions aligned with engineering best practices
- Identify UX improvement opportunities and propose innovative technical solutions
- Participate in code reviews and technical discussions to drive continuous team improvement
- Monitor and optimize service behavior for performance and reliability
- Collaborate closely with product, UX, and frontend teams on integrated end-to-end experiences
- Show openness to frontend development when needed to deliver complete solutions
Requirements:
- 5+ years of backend application development experience
- Experience with JVM-based languages (Java or Scala)
- Knowledge of relational and non-relational databases
- Strong understanding of API design and service architecture
- Ability to work in changing environments with focus on rapid iteration and continuous learning
- Interest in working with AI, prompting, and conversational systems
Nice to Have:
- Experience with modern frontend languages (e.g., React) or willingness to learn and take end-to-end initiatives
- Familiarity with microservices-oriented architectures
- Prior interest or experience with AI-based products
