Senior Software Engineer

• Job Type : Full-Time
• Salary : Based on experience
• Location : Gold Coast, Queensland. Remote considered for the right person in a compatible time zone.

Who we are

Homhero makes cloud software for people who manage short term rental properties. Booking, availability, pricing, guest messaging, cleaning, owner reporting, and the connections to channels like Booking.com, Airbnb, and VRBO all run through our platform. We are a small team based on the Gold Coast and we love what we do.

Where the stack is, and where it is going

Right now a good part of the product runs on a legacy PHP core with a Sencha (Ext JS) frontend. It works, it carries real traffic and it goes us to where we are now. It is the present, not the direction.

The direction is already underway. We have a newer engine written in NestJS and TypeScript that we are actively building out, and a React frontend taking over from Sencha. The plan is clear: retire the PHP core, consolidate into the TypeScript engine, and modernize the frontend.

That is where you come in. You would be building the new things while helping move what matters off the old ones. Expect time in both, with the balance shifting toward the new stack as the work progresses.

What you would actually work on

• Building out our module based engine: bookings, availability, pricing, channel management, messaging, reporting, and the public API, mostly in NestJS and TypeScript
• Integrating with third-party channels and services such as OTAs, pricing tools, and trust accounting systems
• Moving functionality off the PHP core and onto NestJS, piece by piece Contributing to the React frontend as it replaces Sencha
• Writing tests that mean something: unit, integration, and end to end, not just one of the three
• Writing the database migrations that move schema and data safely as the product changes
• Keeping our auto generated API documentation honest as the code changes

About

To be concrete about what sits under all of that, here is the current landscape. Read it as a picture of the work, not a checklist you have to arrive fluent in:

• Backend: NestJS and TypeScript on the new engine, PHP on the legacy core
• Frontend: React for the new interface, Sencha (Ext JS) on the old one
• Infrastructure: AWS, mostly Lambda and EC2, with RabbitMQ for messaging and LocalStack for running AWS services locally
• Data: MongoDB, MySQL, Postgres, and DynamoDB, with real migrations rather than hand edited schemas

You will not touch every one of these every week and nobody expects you to walk in knowing all of them. It is an honest snapshot of what the job involves and what you would pick up along the way.

Infrastructure

We run a large AWS footprint today. We are in the middle of simplifying it, cutting down the number of moving parts and we are seriously evaluating a move to colocated hardware. If you have opinions about infrastructure and where the cloud does and does not earn its cost, you will have people to argue with.

What we are looking for

We care about what you can do and what gets you excited.

• You will probably be a fit if:
• You are comfortable owning backend services in a typed language, and NestJS or similar Node frameworks are not foreign to you
• You can read and work inside code you did not write, including PHP code
• You have integrated with third-party APIs and dealt with the mess that comes with them
• You write tests because you want software to keep working, not because you need to tick a box
• You can write down how a system works so someone else can understand it
• You are direct about problems and comfortable disagreeing in a technical discussion

Experience with accommodation, property management or travel systems is a bonus, not a requirement.

Tools

We use GitHub and Linear. We embrace LLMs but make it clear the responsibility for code still lies with you. LLMs are a tool that may help you but ultimately you need to understand each line and why it’.

How we make the hiring decision

No whiteboard puzzles and no take home test.

Bring us code you have written and are proud of, and walk us through it. It can be open source, a hobby project, something from past work you are allowed to share, anything real that you can talk about. A bonus if the code is somewhat related in stack or purpose to what we do. We want to see how you think about the code you write and the decisions behind it. We will ask questions, so treat it as teaching us about something you already know inside out.

Expect about two calls, with a third if we need it. The first is with the CTO. The second is with an engineering lead. Somewhere along the way we will show you a rough map of our current architecture so we can talk honestly about what we have now and where we want to take it. The conversation goes both ways.

We take the probation period seriously. There are two check-ins during it, with an honest read from both sides on how it is actually going, and at the end we make the call together.