Senior Full-Stack Engineer - AI Travel Platform

Building an AI travel platform. Looking for a senior engineer who has shipped something real. We're building a travel product that collapses the whole trip-planning process into one place: flight search, hotel and stay bookings, and AI-generated itineraries that adapt to budget, dates, and traveler preferences. Think of it as a planning agent that can actually complete the booking, not just suggest one. The company is a software product studio; this is our own product, not client work, so you'll be building something you can point to for years. What you'll work on - Integrating flight and hotel supplier APIs (Amadeus, Duffel, Sabre, or similar) and normalizing wildly inconsistent data into one clean internal model - A search layer that stays fast under aggressive supplier rate limits — caching, fan-out requests, graceful degradation when one supplier times out - An AI itinerary engine using LLM tool calling: the model plans, queries our own search endpoints, and hands a bookable plan back to the user - Booking and payment flows that are idempotent and safe — no double charges, no orphaned reservations, clean handling of partial failures - A Next.js web app and a cross-platform mobile app sharing one API Our stack Next.js / React, Node.js + Express, TypeScript, MongoDB, React Native or Flutter for mobile. We're open to your input on the AI orchestration layer. You're a strong fit if you - Have 5+ years building production web applications, not just prototypes - Have integrated at least one messy third-party API at scale (travel, payments, logistics, insurance — the domain matters less than the scar tissue) - Have shipped something with LLMs beyond a chat wrapper: tool/function calling, structured outputs, evals, cost and latency control - Write your own tests and care about what happens when a request fails halfway through - Communicate clearly in written English and can work asynchronously Bonus - Travel tech, GDS, or NDC experience - Payments experience (Stripe, PCI-aware flows, multi-currency) - You've owned architecture decisions, not just tickets To apply Skip the template. Send us: One project you built that involved a hard third-party integration, and what broke How you'd approach the AI itinerary layer in a few sentences — your actual opinion, not a feature list Start the first line of your proposal with the word COMPASS so we know you read this Proposals without these get archived unread.