Warning: if you’re outside of the Americas timezones, unfortunately, we’re only hiring for engineers with at least some timezone overlap.
Wanderlog helps make leisure travel easier. We believe that travel makes the world better, and are building tools that lower the bar to it. Our core product, built starting 2019, is a travel planning app (we’re the top-ranked trip planner on iOS and Android), but we’re also helping travelers book hotels (without hidden fees), providing them with information (through various pages on e.g., best attractions, restaurants, etc.), and more.
Our founders are twin brothers. Peter worked as an engineer at Stripe and a consultant at McKinsey, and Harry as a product manager at Google. We’re an engineering and product-driven team: the founders studied computer science at Yale, and have built successful, bootstrapped travel companies (BookWithMatrix and All the Flight Deals) with products people love before starting Wanderlog.
We now serve millions of travelers a month, and are a team of 8, including 7 engineers hailing from MIT, the University of Toronto, UC Berkeley, and more; and 1 designer. We’re a self-sustaining, default-alive startup.
We also love traveling. Whether it’s a short hop to Austin, Seattle, or New Orleans; or a longer jaunt to Australia, Hawaii, or Banff National Park (all places the team’s traveled to in the past year!), travel broadens our horizons, builds empathy, and challenges us to grow. We’re working to bring these experiences to more of the world.
What you’ll do:
As an engineer, you’ll be responsible for owning portions of the product. You’ll be expected to:
- Build new features on our website and mobile app. (Our stack is Javascript (Typescript): modern React on the web, React Native on mobile, and Node.js/Express on the server.)
- Design and decide what to build based on what would help travelers and drive growth. You won’t be handed a spec; you’ll be coming up with it!
- Build data pipelines to crawl, process, and synthesize data from various sources around the web.
- Write tests and and build out engineering infrastructure. Our code is fully typed (Typescript) and tested.
- Debug and fix bugs and scale the infrastructure as it grows.
- Review code written by other engineers.
- Be fast and nimble: figure out the best way to build new features at lowest cost in time and future technical debt.
This position is a full-time role reporting to the cofounders at Wanderlog.
What you might work on:
- New, user-friendly hotel booking interfaces that make finding a place to stay easier.
- AI-powered tools that read articles and watch videos for you and summarize the places they mention.
- Improvements to our React Native mobile app so that it runs faster on slower Android phones.
- A Chrome extension to let travelers quickly compare possible places to visit, airfares, and hotels.
- Better invite and collaboration tools to encourage people using Wanderlog to get more friends to join them.
- A better profile page that lets travelers on Wanderlog show off where they’ve been, see how many people they’ve helped, and follow other friends and their trips.
You may be a good fit if you:
- Have at least 2 years of experience doing full-stack, product development work. We have a wide salary range, as we do want to properly accept a range of candidate experiences.
- Are a Javascript developer comfortable with React and/or React Native.
- Are a product person: you’ve built products end-to-end before, and really care about the people who use them.
- Are comfortable with picking up various technologies for the task at hand. We quickly evaluate libraries and tools that could help our product, and variously use Redis, Elasticsearch, and Python as needed too.
- Are entrepreneurial: excited about joining a small, high-growth team and talking to users, doing product and design, and wearing a variety of hats.
- Love travel and believe in it as a positive force personally and for the world.
What’s it like to work here?
We’re an engineering and product-heavy team. Travel’s something everyone does, and we love using the tools we build. A typical week’s work involves talking to users, prioritizing tasks in Sheets, designing on Figma, and building and shipping them continuously.
Our values include putting travelers first, owning the product end-to-end, treating teammates with respect, and moving fast by being smart about what we build and how we build it.
We believe in work fitting in with your life. We love travel and believe it rejuvenates us and makes us better people, and have twice annual travel offsites where the goal is to enjoy visiting a new place and collaborate more closely with the team in person.
Our hiring process
We’ll first have you do an asynchronous programming challenge. If all goes well, we’ll have a coding interview where you work on a quick program on your laptop in your preferred language. We’ll then do another coding interview and a full-day virtual onsite.
Founders
Peter Xu and Harry Yu are twin brothers. Peter shuttled between Los Angeles, Houston, New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong as a consultant at McKinsey before settling down at Stripe as a full-stack engineer, where he worked closely with support teams to build tools that made support agents’ work more productive.
Harry worked at Google as a product manager on Hotel Search, Chrome, and finally Google Assistant for the past three, where he was one of the early PMs on the team.
Before building Wanderlog, they had built Coursetable (featured in the New York Times) and travel sites All the Flight Deals (a flight deals aggregator) and BookWithMatrix (a power-traveler flight search tool). The founders are now glad to have been working on Wanderlog for 6 years, and are excited to make travelers’ lives easier!
