For the Lonely Planet website click here. Curious how Lonely Planet fits into Red Ventures? Click here.

Lonely Planet has been helping people explore the world for over 50 years. While our guidebooks have inspired generations of travelers, we are now building a new generation of digital products and experiences that transform how people discover, plan, and experience travel.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Services team, you will play a key role in shaping the architecture and evolution of the Elixir services that power Lonely Planet’s newly launched mobile app, its iconic website, and an emerging travel platform used by millions of travelers worldwide. You will partner closely with product, design, and engineering leadership to build scalable services, guide technical decisions, and mentor other engineers while delivering high-impact solutions.

This role is not open to visa sponsorship or transfer of visa sponsorship including those on OPT and STEM-EXT OPT, nor is it available to work corp-to-corp.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build scalable, reliable Elixir services that power core product experiences.
• Own the technical design and long-term evolution of key backend services, ensuring scalability, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Lead architectural decisions across services, driving consistent patterns for distributed systems, event-driven communication, and service reliability.
• Collaborate with product managers, designers, and engineers to design and deliver new product capabilities.
• Ensure systems are designed for scalability, maintainability, and performance.
• Drive improvements in system reliability, observability, and operational excellence.
• Identify and resolve production bottlenecks, performance issues, and system failures.
• Participate in and influence engineering standards, architecture discussions, and technical roadmaps.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, and knowledge sharing.
• Contribute to the evolution of our cloud infrastructure and developer tooling.
• Lead root cause analysis for complex production issues and implement long-term fixes.
• Advocate for security, testing, and operational best practices throughout the development lifecycle.
• Stay current with emerging technologies and help guide pragmatic adoption of new tools and approaches.

What We’re Looking For

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
• Significant experience developing production systems in Elixir.
• Strong experience designing and operating distributed backend systems.
• Experience designing and maintaining GraphQL and RESTful APIs.
• Strong understanding of software design principles, system architecture, and performance optimization.
• Experience building and operating cloud-native systems on AWS.
• Experience implementing event-driven architectures and asynchronous processing patterns.
• Strong experience with PostgreSQL and relational data modeling, including query optimization and performance tuning.
• Experience implementing observability practices, including metrics, logging, and monitoring.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives and influence architectural decisions.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills across engineering, product, and leadership.
• Ability to mentor engineers and elevate overall team engineering practices.
• Product-oriented mindset and understanding of how engineering decisions impact user experience.
• Experience scaling high-traffic distributed systems in production environments.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.

Nice to Have

• Exper