Contract Software Engineer Remote Jobs in Columbia, SC

Location: Remote 

How You'll Make an Impact:  

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Booking Engine squad, you'll implement new architectures, features, and best practices to scale the Cloudbeds platform, contributing to our ongoing move toward a service-oriented architecture using modern SaaS and AWS technologies across the stack. You'll work on systems where correctness, latency, and resilience under load are core to the job, not afterthoughts. Your goal is to deliver an exceptional experience to customers around the world, with quality, performance, and scalability top of mind.
Our Booking Engine Team:

This role is part of the Booking Engine Squad, the team behind the guest-facing reservation experience that powers direct bookings for tens of thousands of Cloudbeds properties worldwide. Direct bookings are one of the most valuable channels we can win for a property, and we're constantly building new and innovative ways to help them capture that demand, from richer customization to entirely new booking experiences. It sits on the revenue-critical path, so speed, reliability, and getting the details right directly shape whether a guest completes a booking. It's one of our highest-leverage products, and if you want to own real software used around the world, this is a great team to build on.

What You Bring to the Team:

• Design and implement features and improvements in PHP
• Design and build the APIs and integrations the booking flow depends on
• Model and evolve the data behind availability, pricing, and reservations
• Own the performance, scalability, and reliability of our services at scale
• Contribute to the ongoing initiative to migrate our core platform into microservices and event-driven services
• Lead discussions on complex technical concepts and requirements with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, drive technical decisions, and contribute to the backend architecture group
• Write clean, well-tested, well-documented, and elegant code, including documentation for new and existing areas of our application
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to plan, build, and ship high-quality features
• Mentor team members through pair programming and code reviews
• Re-architect and refactor existing systems, and help design the long-term vision for our technology and component architectures
• Advocate for engineering best practices, quality, and test automation across our code and processes

What Sets You Up for Success:

• 5+ years of PHP web application software engineering experience
• Expert knowledge of relational databases, indexing, and searching technologies
• Experience with API-driven design and development
• Good product sense and empathy for our customers
• Solid Git fundamentals, including workflows and actions
• Strong knowledge of and a passion for software best practices, design patterns, and testing, including test automation across unit, integration, and end-to-end levels
• Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills
• Strong communication, teamwork, and collaboration, with a real sense of ownership and good time management
• Passionate about agile practices and continuous improvement
• Business-level English fluency, verbal and written
• Experience identifying and improving application performance

Bonus Skills to Stand Out:

• Experience with PHP frameworks (Laravel or Symfony)
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes, AWS)
• Experience designing and building microservices
• Experience working with AI coding tools like Claude Code
• Experience working with a remote-first, globally distributed team
• Experience with Jira, Confluence, and GitHub
• Travel industry experience (a plus, but definitely not required!)

Depending on your skills and experience, you can expect your annual compensation to be between $140,000 and $160,000 USD. Please note that we maintain high flexibility, and packages above this range will be considered. (The salary is only for US-based candidates).

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