Senior Software Engineer

About Wander

Wander is revolutionizing the $100 B+ short‑term rental industry. We curate every aspect of the guest experience: from our smart homes to our intuitive booking platform. Our mission is to help people find their happy place, and our vision is to create the infrastructure for people to experience the world.

Backed by top‑tier investors and led by experienced startup veterans, we're a tight‑knit, remote‑first team united by our passion for travel, technology, and creating unforgettable experiences.

Senior Software Engineer

Engineering | Remote (United States) | Salaried, Full-Time

About Wander

Wander is transforming how people explore the world through smart, AI-powered consumer products and real-world travel experiences. We're building the next generation of travel — tools that anticipate traveler needs, empower discovery, and redefine what it means to wander. Join us at the frontier of travel tech, where creativity meets craft and AI shapes the journey.

About the Role

We're not hiring just a software engineer. We're hiring a builder.

The best engineering teams in the world are getting smaller, not bigger. A handful of exceptional people, armed with taste, judgment, and modern AI tooling, are now outshipping teams ten times their size. We've seen it inside Wander. We've built an $80M+ platform with a lean crew that refuses to accept the tradeoff between speed and quality. We want more people like that.

This role is for someone who can take an idea, sometimes a half-formed one, and carry it all the way to production. You think about the user, not just the code. You care about how something looks, how it feels, how it ships, and whether it actually matters. You write code, but you also ask "should we build this at all?" before you start.

You were an engineer before the AI boom. You understand the code that's generated because you've written it by hand for years. Now you're using AI to move faster without sacrificing craft. You treat AI like a power tool, not a crutch — you know when the output is wrong, you know when the architecture is off, and you know when to throw it away and start over.

One of us can do the job of ten. That's not a slogan. It's how we operate.

What You'll Do

• Own features end to end — from problem definition through design, implementation, deployment, and iteration based on real user data. No handoffs. No waiting for specs.
• Ship fast and often. We value momentum. You'll push production code daily, not quarterly.
• Make product decisions. You'll talk to users, look at data, form an opinion, and build. You understand why the code exists, not just how it works.
• Use AI as a force multiplier. You'll direct AI tools to accelerate your work while maintaining architectural integrity and code quality. You review what AI produces with the same rigor you'd apply to a junior engineer's PR — because that's what it is.
• Work across the full stack. Frontend, backend, infrastructure, database — wherever the problem takes you.
• Catch what others miss. You read a spec and spot the omission. You look at a PR and find the edge case. You trace a feature to its failure mode before it reaches production. This is the difference between someone who writes code and someone who builds systems.
• Know what's critical path. Payments, bookings, availability — some code handles money and guest experiences. You know the difference between a service that can degrade gracefully and one that cannot fail, and you engineer accordingly.
• Validate relentlessly. You don't mark something done because it compiles or because the tests pass in a mock. You confirm it works — in a real environment, against real data, under conditions that actually resemble production.
• Communicate proactively. In a globally distributed, async-first team, silence is a risk. You surface blockers early, document decisions, and write things down so others don't have to chase you.

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful time building before AI tools existed. You understand what's under the hood.
• Product instinct. You think about users, not just systems. You've shipped products that people actually use and love.
• Full-stack fluency. You're comfortable across frontend and backend. You don't need a specialist for every layer.
• Taste. You have strong opinions on design, UX, and interaction quality. You notice when something feels off, and you fix it.
• AI-native workflow. You're already using AI coding tools daily: Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code, or similar. You're thoughtful about when they help and when they don't. You can tell when AI-generated code is subtly wrong, and you don't ship it anyway.
• Architectural judgment. You know how to design systems that scale. More importantly, you know when not to over-engineer. You've made the call between "build it right" and "build it now" enough times to have good instincts.
• Testing discipline. You think about what isn't tested. You know the difference between test coverage and test quality. You've been burned by a green CI pipeline that hid a production bug, and you learned from it.
• Business acumen. You can reason about which bugs are P0s and which are cosmetic. You understand the revenue implications of the systems you touch and let that inform your priorities.
• Written communication. You think clearly and write clearly. In a remote, async-first team, this is a superpower.
• Low ego, high output. You pick up your teammates, give feedback directly, skip the politics, and let the work speak.

Bonus Points

• You've built and shipped a product solo or as part of a team of three or fewer.
• Experience with TypeScript, Deno, PostgreSQL, or event-driven architectures.
• Background in travel, hospitality, marketplaces, or high-frequency consumer experiences.
• Experience with AI-powered products or real-time consumer applications.
• You've contributed to or maintained a design system.
• You have a portfolio, side project, or open-source work that shows you build because you love building.

Why Wander?

• Small team, outsized impact. You'll work alongside a handful of exceptional builders, not a bureaucracy.
• Real autonomy. No stand-ups for the sake of stand-ups. No process theater. Just build.
• The future of engineering, right now. We've operated this way from the start : lean, AI-augmented, high-trust, high-output.
• Shape how millions travel. Your work ships to real users solving real problems in a market worth hundreds of billions.
• Competitive compensation with equity. We hire people we can't afford to lose, and compensate accordingly.

Join Us

If you've been waiting for a company that actually runs the way you think engineering should work — small team, real ownership, no bullshit, pure craft — we'd love to hear from you.

Apply now.