Mid Level Software Engineer Jobs in Oxnard, CA (NOW HIRING)

Job Summary:
AmaWaterways River Cruises is committed to delivering unforgettable experiences and is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, Backend. This role is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining backend services and APIs that support the company's digital products, emphasizing strong platform engineering and collaboration across teams.
Responsibilities:
• Design, develop, test, deploy, and maintain scalable, secure, and high-performance backend services and APIs (.NET / C#, RESTful and GraphQL) that support booking, inventory, pricing, lead capture, identity, and guest-experience use cases.
• Architect backend systems, services, and integration patterns, producing technical design documentation (TDDs), architecture diagrams, and decision records for new features and system improvements.
• Translate business and product requirements into sound technical designs, clearly communicating scope, effort, risk, and trade-offs to engineering and product stakeholders.
• Design and optimize data access and persistence layers, including relational database design, complex SQL, query performance tuning, and appropriate use of caching and NoSQL/data-layer patterns.
• Build and maintain secure, well-documented APIs and service contracts, with attention to versioning, error handling, caching, observability, and secure data flows across internal and external systems.
• Integrate backend services with external data sources, partner systems, and identity/access management platforms, ensuring reliable and secure data exchange.
• Optimize services for scalability, throughput, and low-latency performance, and support production reliability through monitoring, logging, telemetry, and alerting.
• Establish and uphold engineering standards for code quality, security, performance, observability, and incident response across owned services.
• Conduct and participate in code reviews, enforce branching and pull-request workflows, and uphold the team's Definition of Ready and Definition of Done tied to CI/CD gates.
• Perform root-cause analysis, troubleshooting, and escalation for production issues and incidents; participate in on-call rotation as required.
• Provide effort estimations and delivery commitments in support of roadmap planning and sprint execution.
• Provide mentorship and technical guidance to mid-level and junior engineers on coding standards, architectural patterns, and backend best practices.
• Champion automation and modern solutions, including the appropriate use of AI-enabled development tools and AI-powered capabilities, where they improve quality, velocity, and reliability.
• Partner with QA, Product, UX/UI, and Platform Engineering to deliver iterative, high-quality releases in an Agile/Scrum environment.
• Stay current with emerging backend technologies, cloud services, API and identity patterns, security standards, AI tooling, and development practices, and evaluate their applicability to AmaWaterways.
• Contributes to and maintains technical documentation such as design specifications, API documentation, and system documentation.
• Performs other related duties as assigned by management.
Qualifications:
Required:
• Bachelor's Degree (BA/BS) from a four-year college or university in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or five or more years of related experience and/or training, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Five or more years of professional software engineering experience with a strong emphasis on backend and platform development.
• Deep hands-on expertise building backend services and APIs with .NET / C# (and/or Node.js), including RESTful and GraphQL API design and implementation.
• Proven experience architecting scalable, secure backend platforms and services supporting booking, inventory, pricing, lead capture, identity, and guest-experience use cases.
• Strong experience analyzing, documenting, and designing software system and service architectures, including integration patterns between internal and external systems.
• Strong experience with relational database design and development (SQL Server, PostgreSQL), writing complex SQL, and performing data analysis and query performance tuning.
• Familiarity with NoSQL/data-layer and caching patterns (e.g., Redis).
• Experience debugging, profiling, and performance tuning backend services and applications.
• Ability to use unit testing tools and apply test-driven development (TDD) practices.
• Professional working experience with XML/XSL, JSON, and SOAP; experience with message-based and event-driven patterns is a plus.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (preferably Microsoft Azure), including app hosting, API management, messaging/service bus, storage, networking, and security concepts.
• Experience designing, building, and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, or similar, across multiple environments (Dev, QA, UAT, Prod).
• Experience with automated build, test, and deployment processes.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code concepts and tools (ARM templates, Bicep, Terraform, or similar) is a plus.
• Experience with observability tooling (Dash0, Datadog, New Relic, or equivalent), application logging, telemetry, and alerting.
• Experience integrating identity and access management using Auth0 or equivalent (OIDC/OAuth2, SSO, JWT).
• Strong understanding of secure coding practices and application security principles (OWASP Top 10, SAST/DAST, secrets management) and PCI considerations for consumer-facing booking and payment flows.
• CompTIA Security+ or other relevant technical/security certification is a plus.
• Skilled using Git and GitHub (or Azure DevOps) for version control, including branching strategies, code reviews, and pull-request workflows.
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments, including estimation, sprint planning, and Definition of Done tied to CI/CD gates.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Ability to mentor junior engineers and provide technical guidance.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate technical concepts for engineering, product, and business audiences.
• Ability to balance multiple priorities and deliver high-quality solutions on time.
Preferred:
• Experience evaluating and applying AI-enabled development tools and AI-powered capabilities to improve engineering quality and velocity is a strong plus.
• Hands-on experience with Claude or comparable AI assistants and coding tools (e.g., for code generation, code review, test authoring, or documentation) is a plus.
• Familiarity with building AI-enabled features and integration patterns, such as LLM APIs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic workflows, or the Model Context Protocol (MCP), is a plus.
• Interest in responsibly incorporating AI into backend services and developer workflows, with attention to data privacy, security, and cost.
• Hospitality, travel, cruise, or e-commerce experience is preferred.
Company:
AmaWaterways River Cruises is a travel & tourism company offering riverboat holiday tours in Europe. Founded in 2002, the company is headquartered in Calabasas, USA, with a team of 51-200 employees. The company is currently Growth Stage.