On Arrival | Plan The Perfect Trip
Website:
onarrival.com
Job details:
OnArrival is building the core infrastructure layer for travel - powering flights, hotels, insurance, payments, and post-booking systems for large platforms.
We operate where:
- APIs are unreliable
- Failures cost money
- Scale is not optional
What You’ll Do- Architect and build backend systems using Spring Boot + Kotlin/Java
- Own platform-critical systems:
- Booking lifecycle
- Payments, refunds, reconciliation
- Supplier orchestration (GDS, aggregators)
- Design for:
- Failures, retries, idempotency
- High concurrency and race conditions
- Build event-driven systems
- Lead engineers via:
- Code reviews (non-negotiable)
- Architecture decisions
- Mentorship
Required Technical Skills (Non-Negotiable)Core Backend- Strong hands-on experience with:
- Java (8+) and/or Kotlin
- Spring Boot (deep understanding, not just usage)
- Solid grasp of:
- Multithreading & concurrency
- JVM internals (memory, GC basics, performance tuning)
- Ability to design:
- Clean, modular, scalable architectures
System Design & Distributed Systems- Strong experience in:
- Designing distributed systems
- Handling partial failures
- Building fault-tolerant services
- Must understand:
- Idempotency
- Circuit breakers, retries, backoff strategies
- Eventual consistency
- API rate limiting and throttling
APIs & Integrations- Experience building and consuming:
- REST APIs (well-designed, versioned)
- Experience handling:
- Third-party APIs with:
- Timeouts
- Inconsistent schemas
- Failure scenarios
- Ability to design:
- Resilient integration layers
Databases- Strong experience with:
- MongoDB (or other NoSQL DBs)
- Postgres (or any relational DB)
- Must understand:
- Data modeling (NoSQL vs relational trade-offs)
- Indexing strategies
- Query optimization
- Transactions and consistency models
Event-Driven Architecture- Hands-on experience with:
- Kafka (or similar message brokers)
- Must understand:
- Producers/consumers
- Consumer groups
- Message ordering and delivery guarantees
- Dead-letter queues, retries
Scalability & Performance- Experience with:
- High-throughput systems
- Low-latency APIs
- Ability to:
- Identify bottlenecks
- Optimize performance (DB, APIs, memory, CPU)
Observability & Debugging- Experience with:
- Logging, monitoring, alerting systems
- Ability to:
- Debug production issues
- Trace distributed system failures
Cloud & DevOps (Working Knowledge Required)- Familiarity with:
- AWS (or any cloud platform)
- Containerization (Docker)
- Understanding of:
- CI/CD pipelines
- Deployment strategies
Code Quality & Engineering Practices- Strong emphasis on:
- Code reviews (you will both give and receive)
- Writing clean, maintainable code
- Testing (unit/integration)
- Experience with:
- Git workflows (branching strategies, PR reviews)
Nice to Have (But Valuable)- Travel domain experience (GDS, booking systems)
- Payments / fintech systems
- Elasticsearch, ClickHouse
- High-scale reconciliation systems
What This Role Actually Means- You own systems where bugs = real money loss
- You design for failure before success
- You don’t ship fragile systems
What Will NOT Work Here- Low ownership mindset
- Avoiding production responsibility
- Over-indexing on titles
- Weak fundamentals hidden behind frameworks
What You Get- Real ownership
- Real scale
- Real impact
How to ApplySend:
- Resume / GitHub
- A short write-up:
- A system you built that handled scale or failure
- What broke and how you fixed it
Click on Apply to know more.