Recent graduate - Backend Engineer

-- This position is for prospective 2023 graduates and with start date September 2023--

OTA Insight is a commercial platform for the hospitality industry (our clients are AirBnb property owners, individual hotels and major chains like Hilton, Accor, etc.). These are exciting times at OTA Insight: we recently raised another round of funding ($80 million) and we have welcomed two new companies, Transparent and Kriya, to our organisation that will expand our product portfolio! To accomplish our ambitious plans we are growing our Engineering team and Backend Engineering has a crucial role to play. So, are you ready to have a big impact in a fast-growing scale-up?

About the position:

We are looking for a Backend Engineer who is passionate about scalable microservices, high-performant APIs, and handling large data streams on the fly, and wants to see their work translated into real life applications that impact 100.000’s of hotels worldwide.

In a fast-growing scale-up priorities might shift from time to time. You’ll gain experience and ownership in different domains depending on your ambition, but here are some general topics:

• Architect, code, test and maintain existing & new Python/GoLang services.
  
• Develop high performing APIs, able to crunch large amounts of data on the fly, powering both our own products as well as those of external partners.
  
• Deploy and monitor services in a reproducible and scalable way.
  
• Experiment with, think about and take ownership of a piece of our codebase/infrastructure and find ways to improve it, both in terms of performance/efficiency and structure/best practices.
  
• Fulfill a central role in product feature- and cross team technical developments. Literally connecting different teams via API implementations.
  

Technologies you’ll work with:

Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Istio, Python, Django, GoLang, Bigtable, FoundationDB, Spanner

(feel free to ask us why these are the best fit for us)

About the team

The OTA Insight Backend team in Ghent is the glue between our different engineering teams. Its mission is to reliably offer access to the vast datasets that power our BI products. Our main dataset holds 3 trillion (yes that’s 12 zeros) hotel rates which are stored in raw form and are aggregated by our APIs on the fly. The team works in close collaboration with our Product team, as well as a highly talented group of software engineers, devops engineers, and project managers to drive initiatives forward.

Today we process billions of data points and +100TB of data on a daily basis, containing hotels' pricing information, search data, hotel bookings, etc. All of that using modern technologies. Being a growth company enables us to regularly attract new and interesting datasets, which can unlock new product directions. 

About OTA Insight

OTA Insight is a scale-up within the hotel industry. Founded in 2012, with a vision to provide user friendly tools to hoteliers. Today we are considered the global leader in hotel BI and are working with 55,000+ hotels worldwide in 185+ countries. As there are more than 1 million hotels worldwide, we are still filled with ambition to grow further.

We generate value to our customers by visualising actionable insights out of our vast datasets. Our tools help hotels to analyse their competition’s room pricing, analyse their hotel revenue, and find out where and when guests are looking and booking. Our products have a profound impact on the day to day activities of our customers, taking away guesswork and simplifying their routines. This has allowed us to grow rapidly over the past few years, adding new products as we solve new problems for our users.

We are not looking for existing knowledge, but rather for the right mindset and potential:

• Bachelor or Master degree in a software engineering field
• You set a high bar for yourself, and expect others to do the same. You’ll find we have an exceptionally talented team and are constantly looking for the best people to join
• You are passionate about what you do. What unites us is our passion to do great work that our users benefit from.
• You are creative, entrepreneurial and open for innovation. We strongly believe that everything can be improved. We expect you to think and learn about new technologies, and take initiative to try and suggest new things
• You are a critical thinker who understands that perfect is the enemy of the good. We don’t over-engineer, but we do whatever it takes to achieve our goals.
• You work well in a team, but don’t mind getting your hands dirty. You’ll quickly learn that we have a very open culture where everyone can be reached out to for help, ideas, feedback and much more. But everyone takes responsibility for their own work.
• Fluent in English

We welcome:

• Experience writing Python and/or Golang code
• Experience with any cloud platform
• Fluency in SQL
• Good software engineering practices, e.g. use of version control