Full-Stack Engineer

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 first product is a Google Docs for planning travel and sharing recommendations. We’re now the top-ranked app on the Android Play Store for terms like “itinerary” and “trip planner”, and on Google for terms like “travel planner” and “itinerary planner”. Even during COVID, we’ve seen our userbase grow.

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 100,000s of travelers a month, and are a team of 6 consisting of 5 engineers and 1 designer spread across the US and Canada. We’ve enjoyed onboarding and training engineers of all skill levels.

We also love traveling. Whether it’s a short hop to Austin, Seattle, or New Orleans; or a longer jaunt to Singapore, Japan, 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.

The Wanderlog team on our Chicago off-site in May, 2025

What you’ll do:

We’re looking to hire a full-time engineer to help us build out the future of travel planning. As an engineer, you will:

• 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.

This position is a full-time role reporting to the cofounders at Wanderlog; you’ll get to work closely and learn a lot not just about engineering, but about product prioritization and scaling a small startup.

What you might work on:

• New, user-friendly hotel booking interfaces that make finding a place to stay easier.
• Improvements to our React Native mobile app so that it runs faster on slower Android phones.
• Steps to finish our migration of our infrastructure onto Docker/Kubernetes.
• Create the data pipeline for new set of pages that we believe will match what users want to see on Google.
• Improvements to our LLM AI pipeline to parse users’ reservation emails.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Are a Javascript developer comfortable with React and/or React Native.
• Have at least basic experience with HTML and Javascript for front-end code.
• 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. We’re not experts, but we learn!
• 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.

We believe in work-life balance. We cover lunches and offer a quarterly travel stipend. We work reasonable hours, and make time for working out, and enjoying life with friends and family. We love travel and believe it rejuvenates us and makes us better people, and have semiannual travel offsites where the goal is to just enjoy visiting a new place and use the tools we’ve built.

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 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 for 5 years 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 BookWithMatrix (a power-traveler flight search tool).

To apply, apply via one of our job listings:

• Work at a Startup
• Handshake