Staff Software Engineer (Availability)

This is a hybrid schedule (2x/week) role planned for our downtown Toronto, Canada office. About OpenTable With millions of diners and tens of thousands of restaurant partners around the world, OpenTable is an industry leader in online reservations. Our technology helps restaurants focus on what matters most – their guests, their teams, and their business – while giving diners a reliable, delightful way to find the perfect restaurant for any occasion.

Every OpenTable employee has a tangible impact, contributing to a global team that includes our sister brand KAYAK and its portfolio of travel products. We believe hospitality is about taking care of others, and that ethos shapes both our products and how we work together. The Opportunity The Diner Core Availability team builds and operates the systems that power availability search for the core diner experience —delivering fast, reliable booking options across our global network.

Requirements

The team owns the end-to-end lifecycle of availability queries: from ingesting upstream changes (inventory, policies, events) through event-driven pipelines, to maintaining highly-optimized in-memory and distributed cache layers, to responding to real-time search requests from web and mobile clients. We’re looking for a Staff Engineer who applies a deep understanding of the underlying technologies and dependencies to solve problems. They help raise the bar on performance, reliability, and simplicity as we scale availability search at OpenTable.

NET , Redis , in-memory and distributed caches , RESTful APIs, and Kafka-based event-driven architectures (EDA) .

What You’Ll Do

You’ll be both a hands-on engineer and a technical leader : writing code, writing technical design docs, reviewing design docs, and owning solutions end-to-end from design through rollout, observability, and ongoing iteration. NET services and APIs that expose availability information to internal and external consumers. Own the architecture of availability search services and related caches, ensuring low-latency, high-throughput performance at global scale.

, Redis) that balance freshness, consistency, and cost. Lead the evolution of our event-driven architecture (Kafka) for propagating inventory, configuration, and policy changes into availability systems. , for design exploration, code generation, test scaffolding, and incident analysis) to increase team velocity while maintaining a high quality bar Drive execution and outcomes Break down large, ambiguous availability initiatives into sequenced technical workstreams Provide reliable estimates and hold yourself accountable to delivery commitments, while adjusting plans thoughtfully as new information emerges.

Proactively identify and unblock cross-team dependencies across other backend and platform teams Represent the team in projects you own during sync meetings by providing clear, and actionable updates. NET and our surrounding ecosystem, with a focus on simplicity, testability, readability, and long-term maintainability. Represent the Diner Core Availability team in cross-team forums and communities of practice, ensuring our systems align with platform-wide standards while feeding local needs back into those standards.

Foster a healthy, inclusive engineering culture : encourage thoughtful debate, blameless retros, and data-driven decision-making.

What We’Re Looking For

Technical experience Strong experience (5+ years) designing, implementing, and o