This will be a remote role to start, with plans to transition to hybrid in-office 2x/week located in downtown Toronto.
About OpenTable:
With millions of diners, 60,000+ restaurant partners and 25+ years of experience, OpenTable, part of Booking Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: BKNG), is an industry leader with a passion for helping restaurants thrive. Our world-class technology empowers restaurants to focus on what matters most – their team, their guests, and their bottom line – while enabling diners to discover and book the perfect restaurant for every occasion.
Every employee at OpenTable has a tangible impact on what we do and how we do it. You’ll also be part of a global team and its portfolio of metasearch brands. Hospitality is all about taking care of others, and it defines our culture.
The Opportunity
The Diner Core Reservation team builds and operates the systems that power the reservation lifecycle for the core diner experience – from slot lock and booking through change, cancel, confirm, and downstream event publication. These systems sit at the center of a critical set of diner, restaurant and partner flows, serving OpenTable web and mobile clients as well as partner integrations, and they operate multi-region with strict expectations around correctness, latency, and reliability.
We’re looking for a Senior Engineer who can design and deliver changes in a complex reservation domain, raise the bar on software quality, and help the team move quickly without compromising reliability. The team works across a mix of C#/.NET and Java services and supporting systems, and the role requires comfort navigating both ecosystems. Other technologies you’ll work with include Redis, relational databases such as Postgres or SQL Server, in-memory and distributed caches, RESTful APIs, and Kafka-based event-driven architectures (EDA).
What You'll Do
You’ll be a hands-on backend engineer: writing code, contributing to design docs, reviewing changes thoughtfully, and owning work from design through rollout, observability, and iteration.
Code craft and Architecture
- Design, implement, and evolve backend services and APIs that support various reservation related workflows
- Build a strong understanding of how reservation flows interact with adjacent systems such as partner APIs, restaurant systems, payment services, and event publishers.
- Contribute to resilient service behavior in distributed systems, including thoughtful handling of retries, rollback, failure modes, and cross-region routing.
- Write maintainable, well-tested code with a strong emphasis on integration testing and production readiness for business-critical reservation flows.
- Use AI tooling thoughtfully to accelerate implementation, design exploration, testing, and incident analysis while maintaining a high quality bar.
- Break down large, ambiguous reservation initiatives into clear technical workstreams that can be delivered incrementally.
- Partner effectively with Product, TPM, and neighboring engineering teams to resolve dependencies and move projects forward.
- Take ownership of production issues, triage them calmly, communicate clearly, and drive fixes through to completion.
- Provide clear, actionable updates on the work you own and help keep execution grounded in measurable outcomes.
Team Contribution
- Participate meaningfully in code reviews and design reviews, giving feedback that improves quality, simplicity, readability, testability and long-term maintainability.
- Help improve engineering standards around testing, documentation, rollout safety, and operational excellence.
- Share knowledge across the team and contribute to a healthy engineering culture grounded in thoughtful debate, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
- Participate in communities of practice, ensuring our systems align with platform-wide standards while feeding local needs back into those standards.
What We're Looking For
- Strong experience designing, implementing, and operating backend services in C#/.NET and/or Java, with the ability to quickly ramp up in either ecosystem.
- Hands-on experience with Redis and other cache technologies, including key design, eviction strategies, cache invalidation patterns, and multi-layer caching topologies.
- Solid understanding of event-driven architectures and Kafka (or similar systems)
- Solid experience with database systems (SQL/NoSQL), including schema design, indexing strategies, query optimization, and handling high-volume read/write workloads.
- Good grasp of distributed systems fundamentals and observability and performance tuning in production
- Strong testing instincts, including unit and integration testing for critical flows.
- Comfortable using AI-assisted development tools (for example, to accelerate implementation, test coverage, code reviews, or incident analysis) in a safe and responsible way.
- Experience in reservation, booking, marketplace, or other transaction-heavy platforms.
- Familiarity with payment-related reservation flows such as credit card holds, deposits, or prepaid experiences.
- Experience working with event-driven systems, regionalized services, or highly-integrated legacy-to-modernized architectures.
- Demonstrated ownership: you proactively identify problems, unblock yourself and others, and drive work to completion.
- Ability to take ambiguous requirements and translate them into clear, well-reasoned technical solutions.
- Comfortable collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders and balancing technical constraints, user experience, and business impact.
- Clear communicator who can explain technical findings and trade-offs effectively to engineers and non-engineers.
- Generous paid vacation (20 days) + time off for your birthday
- Work from (almost) anywhere for up to 20 days per year
- Focus on mental health and well-being:
- Company-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth
- Company-paid subscription to Headspace
- Annual company-wide week off a year - the whole team fully recharges (and returns without a pile-up of work!)
- Paid parental leave
- Paid volunteer time
- Focus on your career growth:
- Development Dollars
- Leadership development
- Access to thousands of on-demand e-learnings
- Travel Discounts
- Employee Resource Groups
- Private health and dental insurance
- Life and Disability insurance
The expected range of compensation for this position based in Toronto, Canada, including commission and/or bonuses is $140,000 - $155,000 CAD. There are a variety of factors that go into determining a compensation range, including but not limited to external market benchmark data, geographic location, and years of experience sought/required.
We offer a competitive base salary and benefits including: health benefits; flexible spending account; retirement benefits; life insurance; paid time off (including PTO, paid sick leave, medical leave, bereavement leave, floating holidays and paid holidays); and parental leave benefits. This role is eligible to be considered for an annual bonus and equity grant.
Work Environment & Flexibility
At OpenTable, we pride ourselves on fostering a global and dynamic work environment. As a team member with us, you will benefit from a schedule tailored to accommodate a global workforce operating across multiple time zones. While the majority of your responsibilities may align with conventional business hours, there will be instances where you are expected to manage communications - via calls, Slack messages, or emails - outside of regular working hours to effectively collaborate with international colleagues, respond to restaurant partners, and/or address urgent matters. OpenTable will always abide by and consider local laws and regulations.
We’re committed to creating a workplace where everyone feels they belong and can thrive. We know the best ideas come when we bring different voices to the table, so we're building a team as dynamic as the diners and restaurants we serve—and fostering a culture where everyone feels welcome to be themselves.
If you need accommodations during the application or interview process, or on the job, we’re here to support you. Please reach out to your recruiter to request any accommodations.
