Staff Backend Engineer - Platform (f/m/d)

Staff Backend Engineer – Platform Join Apaleo and shape the future of hospitality tech Apaleo is the world's most open, API-first property management platform powering the next generation of hospitality operations. Its modular, AI-powered infrastructure lets hoteliers customise their tech stack, automate routine work and deliver seamless, personalised guest experiences, powered by best-in-class apps and autonomous AI agents that adapt to every stay. If you're driven by the idea of making hospitality smarter, more human and powered by cutting-edge technology, we'd love to hear from you. About the role You'll join our Platform team as an individual contributor working closely with our Principal Engineer, who leads Platform's technical direction. Platform owns infrastructure, developer experience and security foundations for the whole engineering org, so this is a high-ownership seat: you'll take on large, ambiguous, cross-cutting initiatives and drive them from first analysis through to completion, with real autonomy over how you get there. We don't run a groomed backlog or sprint planning. We assign a big topic to someone who owns it end to end. If you thrive with structure handed to you, this isn't the role; if you love spotting the problem worth solving and driving it yourself, you'll fit right in. What you'll be up to • Architecting and developing scalable, reliable and maintainable backend systems. • Self-identifying and scoping problems and initiatives, not just executing assigned tickets: assessing impact, prioritisation and timing independently. • Leading architectural decisions and design discussions with cross-team alignment. • Driving large, ambiguous, cross-cutting initiatives end to end, including coordination with multiple stakeholders. • Mentoring engineers and driving technical excellence. • Building and maintaining internal tools and infrastructure (AWS, Terraform) that empower teams to deliver faster and more reliably. • Owning observability, logging and operational excellence to keep the platform highly available. • Participating in on-call rotations and stepping in as a reliable problem solver during incidents. • Proactively spotting where AI and automation can drive technical improvement. Some of the challenges waiting for you • Solving horizontal write-scaling for our database (we already scale reads horizontally). • Modernising our CI/CD pipeline for faster, more reliable delivery. • Migrating our infrastructure-as-code fully from CloudFormation to Terraform, including the ability to recreate an Apaleo environment from scratch. • Extracting and reworking common services (like shared schedulers) to get us ready for our next scale level. What you'll bring to the team • 8+ years of backend development experience, including several years in a staff-level or technical leadership role. • Strong engineering fundamentals that transfer across languages and cloud platforms: we care more about how you think than which stack you've used. • A track record of owning large technical initiatives from ambiguity through to completion, ideally on a platform or infrastructure team rather than a pure product team. • Experience designing and scaling distributed systems in cloud-native environments (AWS preferred; strong Azure fundamentals with genuine enthusiasm for the switch work just as well). • Comfortable working with containerised services and infrastructure-as-code (Docker, Terraform; CloudFormation exposure is relevant given our current stack). • Confidence writing your own unit and integration tests: we don't have a dedicated QA function. • Fluent English. Nice to have • Direct experience with C# (.NET), PostgreSQL, AWS and ECS/Kubernetes: a great fit, though not a hard requirement if your fu