Senior Backend Ads Engineer - HTS Media Services

About HTS Media

HTS Media is Hopper’s advertising and media division, built to help travel brands, destinations, and suppliers connect with travelers at scale. We power advertising placements across Hopper’s app and through our B2B partner network, which includes global brands like Capital One Travel and TripAdvisor. Our mission is to build the travel industry’s leading retail media network, turning advertising into a major driver of profitability for Hopper and our partners, much like Instacart, Uber, and Amazon have done in their sectors.

We’re still in the early stages of our roadmap, yet HTS Media has already become one of Hopper’s fastest-growing and most profitable business units. The engineering team plays a pivotal role in scaling the platform, ensuring our ad tech products deliver measurable impact for advertisers and seamless experiences for travelers.

About the Role

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the HTS Media team, you will be a core contributor to the engine that powers our entire advertising platform. You will be responsible for designing, building, and scaling the high-throughput, low-latency services that handle ad requests, run auctions, and serve millions of relevant offers to travelers in real-time. This is a mission-critical role where your work will directly impact platform performance, advertiser success, and Hopper’s bottom line.

You will tackle complex challenges inherent to the ad tech space, from optimizing our real-time bidding (RTB) logic to ensuring millisecond response times under heavy load. You will serve as a technical leader, mentoring other engineers, driving architectural decisions, and setting the standard for high-quality, scalable code. If you are passionate about building distributed systems that operate at a massive scale, this is the role for you.

Responsibilities

• Build the Core Engine: Design, develop, and deploy high-performance microservices for ad serving, targeting, and bidding.
• Optimize for Scale and Speed: Obsess over system performance, identifying and eliminating bottlenecks to ensure our services meet stringent low-latency requirements.
• Ensure High Availability: Build resilient, fault-tolerant systems and implement robust monitoring to maintain rock-solid reliability.
• Drive Technical Excellence: Lead architectural discussions, conduct code reviews, and champion best practices in software development.
• Collaborate for Impact: Partner closely with product managers, data engineers, and the rest of the engineering team to ship cohesive, high-impact features.
• Mentor and Lead: Provide technical guidance and mentorship to other engineers on the team, helping to level up the entire organization.

Experience

• 5+ years of professional software development experience, with a focus on building distributed, backend systems.
• Direct experience in ad tech or retail media is required. This includes familiarity with concepts like ad serving, real-time bidding, and ad campaign management.
• Proven track record of designing and operating high-throughput, low-latency services in a cloud environment.
• Strong experience with high-performance databases and caching systems.
• Deep understanding of system design, data structures, and algorithms.
• A strong sense of ownership and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial environment where you can make a significant impact.

Perks and benefits of working with us

• Well-funded and proven startup with large ambitions, competitive salary and the upsides of pre-IPO equity packages.
• Hopper offers employees enrollment to a Hopper sponsored Health Collective that includes options for basic medical and dental insurances, as well as options for deductibles.
• Hopper offers private insurance coverage to supplement social security payments attributed to Accidental Death and Long term disability, including Excess and Gap insurances.
• In lieu of a formal pension plan, Hopper will provide a cash allowance to put towards pension savings.
• Please ask us about our very generous parental leave, much above industry standards!. Unlimited PTO.
• Flexdesk coworking All Access Pass AND Work-from-home stipend.
• Carrot Cash travel stipend.
• Entrepreneurial culture where pushing limits and taking risks is everyday business.
• Open communication with management and company leadership.
• Small, dynamic teams = massive impact.

#LI-REMOTE

More about Hopper

At Hopper, we are on a mission to become the leading travel platform globally – powering Hopper’s mobile app, website and our B2B business, HTS (Hopper Technology Solutions). By leveraging massive amounts of data and advanced machine learning algorithms, Hopper combines its world-class travel agency offering with proprietary fintech products to bring transparency, flexibility and savings to travelers globally. We have developed several unique fintech solutions that address everything from pricing volatility to trip disruptions – helping people travel better and save more on their trips.

The Hopper platform serves hundreds of millions of travelers globally and continues to capture market share around the world. he Hopper app has been downloaded over 120 million times and has become largely popular among younger travelers – with 70% of its users being Gen Z and millennials.

While everyone knows us as the Gen Z and Millennial travel app, Hopper has evolved to become much more than that. In recent years, we’ve grown into a travel fintech provider, commerce platform, and global travel agency that powers some of the world’s largest brands.

Through HTS, our B2B division, the company supercharges its partners’ direct channels by integrating our fintech products on their sites or powering end-to-end travel portals. Today, our partners include leading travel brands like Capital One, Nubank, Air Canada, and many more.

Here are just a few stats that demonstrate the company’s recent growth

• Billions of dollars worth of travel and travel fintech are sold through Hopper and HTS’ channels every year.
• Our fintech products – including Cancel for Any Reason and Flight Disruption Assistance – have exceptionally strong CSAT because the terms are always clear, and customers receive instant, no-questions-asked resolutions.
• Almost 30% of our app customers purchase at least one fintech product when making a booking; and consumers are 1.6x more likely to repurchase if they add fintech to their booking vs if they booked just travel.

Given the success of its fintech products, Hopper launched a B2B initiative, HTS (Hopper Technology Solutions), which represents more than 75% of the business.

Through HTS, any travel provider (airlines, hotels, banks, travel agencies, etc.) can integrate and seamlessly distribute Hopper’s fintech or travel inventory on their direct channels. As its first HTS partnership, the company partnered with Capital One to co-develop Capital One Travel, a new travel portal designed specifically for cardholders. Other HTS partners include Air Canada, Uber, CommBank, Nubank, Flair Airlines and many more.

Hopper has been named the #1 most innovative company in travel by Fast Company Hopper has been downloaded over 120 million times and continues to have millions of new installs each month. Hopper is now the #3 largest online travel agencies in North America and 70% of our app customers are Gen-Z and millennials travelers.

Hopper has raised over $750 million USD of private capital and is backed by some of the largest institutional investors and banks in the world. HTS is primed to continue its growth as the leading travel ecommerce provider in a $1 trillion online shopping category. The Hopper app and website will also continue to be the preferred travel provider for Gen Z and Millennials..

Come take off with us!