ABOUT US 🚀

Our vision is to be the world’s leading social travel platform.

We are on a mission to help travellers find their people and create unforgettable moments together. Connections matter as much as destinations, and we are building a global ecosystem to enable them.

Since the launch of our social network in the hostelling category in 2022, Hostelworld has experienced transformational growth. We have successfully welcomed over 2.6 million social members to our platform, proving the strong demand for connection in travel. This vibrant community is not just booking trips; they are actively engaging, co-creating, and becoming our most powerful brand advocates. The platform is rich with user-generated content, including a rapidly growing volume of customer testimonials and authentic travel stories that provide powerful social proof.

The growth in engagement is remarkable: the number of messages sent between travellers has grown significantly faster than the number of trips booked by social members, demonstrating the deep social utility of our platform. This momentum is reflected in our robust financial health, underscored by a strong balance sheet powered by an asset-light, cash-generative business model.

We are not just another Online Travel Agent (OTA); we have created a new category of travel altogether: Social Travel. Our singular focus on helping travellers find people to hang out with is the foundation of our strategy. It has allowed us to build a powerful and defensible market position, which attracts highly valuable customers and shifts more of our business onto our mobile-native apps.

While our app and social features create a sticky user experience, our true competitive moat stems from the incredibly rich, proprietary data set generated by our social network. As our community grows, so does the value of this data, creating a compounding network effect that is nearly impossible to replicate. This "social flywheel" allows us to understand traveller behaviour, predict needs, and personalise experiences in ways that generalist OTAs cannot match. It is the engine that will power our long-term, differentiated growth and solidify our position as the sole player in the Social Travel category we created.

At our Capital Markets Day in April 2025, we unveiled our ambitious strategy to build on our success and realise our vision over the next three years. This strategy is organised around five key themes:

• Strengthening the Core OTA Platform: We will continue to enhance our core booking engine, ensuring a seamless and efficient experience for our customers and hostel partners, further solidifying our position as the leading platform for hostel discovery and booking.
• Building 'Pre-Booking' Social Features: We are developing innovative features like 'Travel Plans', designed to engage users much earlier in their travel journey. These features will accelerate the creation of social profiles and drive app downloads, fuelling our social flywheel before a single bed is booked.
• Leveraging AI for an Enhanced Social Experience: We will embed AI into our pre- and post-booking features to deliver unparalleled personalisation and value. This includes AI-powered recommendations for people to meet, places to go, and things to do, making our social network an indispensable travel companion.
• Expanding our Addressable Market: We will expand our reach and product portfolio through targeted partnerships and M&A. This will allow us to cater to a broader segment of the youth travel market and integrate new, complementary services into our social travel ecosystem.
• Building New Revenue Streams: Our social network is more than an engagement tool; it is a new platform for monetisation. We will develop new revenue streams directly from our social features, creating value for our users and our business in ways that traditional OTAs cannot.

Our Culture

At Hostelworld, our culture is a direct reflection of our customers: adventurous, curious, and social. We have a shared love of travel that fuels our work and connects us on a deeper level. It’s a fast-paced environment that blends the agility and "scrappy" resourcefulness of a start-up with the experience and ambition of a global, publicly listed company.

We are a team of pragmatic optimists who are data-obsessed and results-driven. We value a ‘test and learn’ mindset, encouraging experimentation and empowering our teams to take calculated risks. We believe in doing the right thing—for our customers, our partners, and each other. We foster a supportive and collaborative atmosphere where diverse perspectives are celebrated, and where every team member has the opportunity to make a significant impact on our journey. We embrace the journey, not just the destination, and we seek leaders who will thrive in a dynamic environment and inspire their teams to do the same.

LOCATION🌍

This role is based in Portugal. We have an office hub in Porto available for those who prefer a hybrid model where you can spend time with colleagues in-person. You will need to be able to commute to our office hub as required from time to time.

WHO YOU'LL WORK WITH 👨🏽‍🤝‍👨🏼

You will play a key role in a diverse, highly-talented team managing cloud-native data engineering systems to consistently ensure the timely, accurate and secure production and delivery of data from the Hostelworld platform.
You will work closely with other technology groups and business owners to refine quality standards and processes for Data processing design, pipeline design, development and deployment. The underlying purpose is to ensure we have an efficient, robust, secure and performant data service to support our business growth.

WHAT YOU'LL DO 👩‍💻

We’re seeking a Senior Data Engineer to lead the integration and modernization of a recently acquired company’s data ecosystem. You’ll collaborate closely with our new colleagues to learn, document, and understand their existing data product — currently based on Python and Airtable — and work to evolve it into our modern Google Cloud Platform (GCP) stack.

This is a hands-on, strategic role that combines architecture, delivery excellence, and collaboration. You’ll bring strong software engineering discipline to our data workflows, ensuring all pipelines are built with testability, version control, and CI/CD best practices in mind.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR 👀

Bridge and Modernize Systems

• Learn and document the acquired company’s current data ecosystem, including their Airtable structures, Python scripts, and API integrations.
• Translate that understanding into clear technical documentation and communicate findings back to our internal data and engineering teams.
• Design and lead a modernization roadmap to integrate their systems into our GCP-based medallion architecture.
• Champion pragmatic migration strategies that balance business continuity with long-term scalability.

Design and Deliver Robust Data Pipelines

• Build, orchestrate, and maintain scalable ELT pipelines using Astro (Airflow), DBT, and BigQuery.
• Ingest data from APIs and third-party systems into our unified data model.
• Embed data validation, testing, and observability into every stage of the pipeline.
  
  

Apply Engineering Best Practices

• Drive excellence in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) — from design and peer review to automated testing, deployment, and monitoring.
• Implement and improve CI/CD pipelines for data workflows (e.g., Astro Cloud, GitHub Actions, Terraform).
• Promote a “data-as-code” mindset, ensuring reproducibility, versioning, and auditability across environments.

Collaborate and Lead in an Agile Environment

• Act as a senior contributor in the teams Scrum ceremonies (planning, review, retrospectives), driving transparency and continuous improvement.
• Communicate findings, technical designs, and migration recommendations clearly and proactively to internal stakeholders.
• Partner with global data and software teams to align on design standards, delivery milestones, and business priorities.

Experience & Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering, designing, building, and maintaining robust, cloud-native data pipelines.
• 3+ years of experience as a Python developer, developing data processing scripts, automation, and API integrations.
• 2+ years of experience in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including deploying and managing scalable ETL/ELT pipelines
• Proven track record with orchestration and transformation tools, including Astro (Airflow) and DBT.
• Strong understanding of data quality, testing, and observability frameworks (e.g., Great Expectations, dbt tests).
• Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines for data workflows using tools such as GitHub Actions, Terraform, and Astro Cloud.
• Familiarity with Agile and Scrum practices, with experience collaborating in cross-functional teams and leading technical discussions.
• Demonstrated ability to learn, document, and modernize legacy data systems while communicating technical findings clearly to internal stakeholders.
  
  

Bonus Experience & Qualifications

• Experience working with Airtable and integrating its API into larger data systems
• Hands-on experience with BigQuery for data storage, analytics, and transformation.

WHAT WE OFFER 💯

• Competitive salary & benefits 
• Enhanced annual leave plus 3 Wellbeing Days per year 
• Paid family leave (maternity, paternity, surrogacy & adoption) 
• Agile working (plus a Working from Abroad Policy!) 
• Support for your ongoing growth & development 
• Inclusive people policies (sickness, menopause, compassionate and fertility leave) 
• A chance to give back to your local community with 5 paid volunteering days

OUR BEHAVIOURS 🏆

• Grow others - We fundamentally believe that investing in growing others benefits everyone, whether it's helping them develop hard or soft skills. We want learning and growing to be part of our DNA to help makes us a better team, together.
• Master it - We are obsessed with our area of expertise and enjoy developing our skills. We rarely take things at face value; we investigate, interrogate, and always look for ‘the why,’ and wherever possible, we use data to find the best solution.
• Collaborate - We are in it together, for the tough stuff and the celebrations too. To achieve the best results, we need expertise from all areas of the organisation, and we wholeheartedly welcome diverse thinking.
• Adapt - We work fluidly, adapting to new information and the evolving environment while staying committed to our goals. Innovation and experimentation fuel our projects and we’re never afraid to pivot.
• Deliver - Our focus is always on the end result; we value outcomes over activity. We collaborate to deliver work at speed without dropping any of our other behaviours.

We believe in talented and diverse teams that reflect the diversity of our customers and the communities in which we operate. Everyone brings different perspectives and experiences. We lay out the above requirements to guide applicants to the experiences that we believe will allow you to be successful in the role. If you don’t meet them all, please consider applying if you think you can still perform the role as described.