Senior Scala Engineer - Backend

Rocket Travel is looking for a Senior Scala Engineer - Backend with experience using the JVM ecosystem to join our engineering team. Remote employment is an option for this role.

At Rocket, we encourage experimentation, so we're not a one language/one framework shop. We hire people who know how to pick the right tool for the job and learn along the way. 

Rocket Travel is a place where you:

• Work with a group of intrinsically motivated people with a track record for building successful new businesses from scratch.
• Embody curiosity, community, and accountability. We live and build products by these values every day. 
• Own decisions and take action that can be implemented in a matter of days (or hours).
• Get inspired and encouraged to vacation faster, with an annual vacation stipend.
• Receive a competitive compensation package, including bonus, 401k with match, flexible vacation time, maternity and paternity benefits, health, and dental insurance.
• Total Compensation is based on experience - NEGOTIABLE - Sign-on Bonus + Salary: $120k - $170k + Bonus: 10% - 20%
• Can have the option to work remotely. Though we have great offices in Chicago’s West Loop and in NYC’s Empire State building, we have a hybrid team, a flexible work environment, and we welcome full-time remote applicants, too.
• Share your passion for travel with equally adventurous teammates. 
• Work within the largest online travel company in the world. Rocket Travel creates B2C and B2B2C travel products and is part of Booking Holdings (BKNG). We have many worldwide partners and a diversified business. Despite the world’s current situation, Booking Holdings has been rated the healthiest company in travel, and Rocket itself is already seeing travel demand surpass pre-pandemic levels

As a Senior Scala Engineer (Backend) at Rocket Travel, you will: 

• Be involved in all facets of the software development process from inception to deployment.
• Develop distributed high performance and high availability services to power our new enterprise level B2B platform.
• Evolve the Rocket toolkit by identifying and recommending the best tool for each task.
• Be a Scientist and Experiment with software to interface with SQL Server, Kafka, Kubernetes, and Docker.
• Create A/B tests to bring our users a constantly improving experience.
• Improve existing code to make it more testable, tested, and resilient.
• Constantly look for ways to improve our products, code-base and development practices.
• Add visibility to critical applications and processes.
• Deploy daily to highly-available applications.
• Maintain a sense of empathy for our customers and moving quickly where users are most acutely affected.

About you:

• You have at least 3 years of experience with Scala to design and develop distributed, high-performance, and high-availability services.
• You have worked with JVM tools and languages for at least one project (Java, Scala, Kotlin).
• You have enjoyed working on global projects serving world markets with distributed data centers.
• Have experience in a data driven company with experience analyzing and working with Big Data.
• You enjoy building new products, playing with APIs and data, and discovering and exploring new technologies and ideas.
• You have experience working with service oriented architecture or micro services based applications.
• You are passionate about sharing ownership and product direction for our customer-facing products or internal applications.
• You are passionate about learning and helping your teammates learn.
• You are passionate about how your code translates into a better customer experience.
• You are experienced with agile programming methodologies.
• You love to travel & have or will obtain a valid passport. Rocket loves sending their people to train and work with others in some of our global locations from time to time. Not a frequent request but just in case, we'd love to know you might have interest.

About Rocket Travel

We make travel more rewarding than anyone else 

Rocket Travel awards customers for booking travel through our products, allowing people to earn or use loyalty benefits from their favorite loyalty programs.

Our journey

We began in 2013 with the same goal of making travel even more rewarding. This started with our bespoke Rocketmiles website, earning travelers their favorite airline loyalty miles for hotel bookings, and every year since, we’ve advanced our goal.

We now partner with over 60 loyalty programs that travelers can choose from, we build unique partner-branded travel sites, we offer the ability to earn and redeem loyalty rewards, we sit within Booking Holdings—the most experienced Group of travel companies in the world—and we continually grow the number of ways that people can book travel through us, from stays to cars and more.



Travel constantly evolves, opening additional opportunities to create rewarding experiences, and we intend to be at the forefront of building and innovating on those for travelers worldwide.

A diverse and global team

Our teammates work across the globe, in person and remotely. We have offices in Chicago, NYC, Bangkok, Bogota, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and Cebu. No matter where people work, our main team-building goal is to create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment. We do that with a Diversity and Inclusion Committee, setting DEI hiring goals, investing in employee retention, and conducting regular team training that fosters collaboration and morale.

All of these efforts help ensure that we’re promoting a supportive workplace, where people are motivated to grow professionally and build rewarding travel experiences together. 

Note on general employment requirements

Candidates should be authorized to accept employment in the US from any employer, should be willing to start within three weeks of accepting an offer, and should be able to work the same daily working hours as our Chicago office.

A final word

If the idea of working within an environment that promotes accountability, curiosity, and community to build reward travel products sounds motivating to you, we would love to hear from you—even if you’re unable to meet 100% of the job requirements. We never expect people to have all of the answers, as long as they’re willing and able to learn and grow with us.

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