AI-First Software Engineer (all genders)
Holidu
Description
Holidu is one of the world’s fastest-growing vacation rental technology companies. Our mission is to make booking and hosting holiday homes free of doubt and full of joy, by helping hosts generate more bookings with less work and helping guests find a holiday home they truly enjoy. Our team of 700 colleagues from 60+ nations shares a passion for tech, an ambition for constant improvement, and a relentless drive to bring the best experience to more than 40k vacation rental hosts and 4 million annual guests.
Your future team Join our Host Experience department as an AI-First Software Engineer on the team that powers how our hosts' holiday rentals reach the world.
You'll work at the core of our distribution engine, where we take tens of thousands of homes and generate millions of bookings on major travel platforms like Holidu, Booking.com, Airbnb, VRBO, HomeToGo, and Check24. This is absolutely core to our architecture: when distribution works well, hosts reach millions of guests without ever thinking about it. We synchronize large volumes of updates at high speed, maintain high availability, and integrate with a wide range of partner APIs, each with its own structure, quirks, and constant evolution.
The interesting problem is staying ahead of all that gracefully, at scale.
We're an AI-first team, and we see how much it expands what's possible. We build systems that adapt on their own, catch issues before they surface, and turn one-off fixes into lasting solutions. That's a big part of where we're headed, and you'll help shape it.
Our Tech Stack We mostly build on JVM, specifically Kotlin on Spring Boot, with some Java in the mix - and we run on AWS.
Beyond that, it's tooling: the right database for the job (mostly PostgreSQL), event-driven messaging, the usual cloud-native stack, and so on.
You can read more about our tech stack here.
Don't worry if you haven't used all of these. What counts is a strong engineering foundation; the tools are learnable.
Your role in this journey
- Work AI-first, every day. AI is part of how you work and increasingly what you build. You use these tools daily for: writing code, understanding unfamiliar parts of the system, and exploring data. You stay genuinely current on what they can and can't do. Not as a trick, but as part of how you think and build.
- Shape the product, not just the code. Build a strong understanding of the product, use it to drive initiatives end-to-end, and actively shape the team's direction rather than just executing on it. You'll care about the why behind the features and the business impact behind the systems.
- Own crucial services end-to-end. Design, build, and maintain the services at the heart of our distribution engine - the ones our hosts and partners rely on every day. Reliability is the whole game here: you'll set up monitoring, define SLOs, and drive incidents to resolution so the team can move fast with confidence.
- Build for scale and ship daily. Ensure our applications handle tens of thousands of properties and millions of bookings. Deploying our solutions is done automatically and continuously throughout our day. You'll experiment with new technologies, learn, apply, and share engineering best practices, and help us evaluate state-of-the-art tools as we grow.
- Collaborate and raise the bar. Work in a supportive, cross-functional team that values knowledge sharing and improving together.
Your backpack is filled with
- Product instincts. You care about solving real problems for hosts and guests, and you ask "what problem are we solving?" instead of "what should I do next?".
- Genuine fluency with AI tools. You use AI as part of how you think and build, and you're excited about applying it to real engineering and business problems, not as a buzzword, but as a daily habit you keep sharpening.
- 2–5 years building backend services in pro