Backend Engineer, Automation

Who we are

We are a high-growth tech startup, located in Toronto, helping travellers all over the world. At sherpa°, our mission is to help travellers move freely around the world, and shift the way the world's leading travel providers think about borders. We are enabling travel companies to rebuild trust in international travel by demystifying border requirements and bringing clarity to travelers everywhere. We are looking for team members who are excited about our mission, committed to personal growth, and excited to take ownership of their work.

We create a positive and collaborative work environment, have regular team events, bi-weekly social activities and offer attractive compensation, including equity participation and benefits.

What we're looking for

As a Backend Engineer - Automation , you'll architect and build the Automation Platform that powers global travel for millions of passengers monthly. Sherpa° is seeking an engineer who thrives on designing robust, resilient and flexible APIs in a modular and iterative environment that directly impacts travelers from 193 countries.

You'll be taking a front row seat as the very first user of what you are building and joining a team of engineers who are developing and operating the latest generation of our automation platform. Together you'll be expanding the features and build everything needed for a smooth collaboration with a technical operations team. You build it, you own it.

You'll collaborate directly with product managers, frontend engineers, and designers to deliver API contracts that streamline visa applications for partners like American Airlines , Air Canada , and British Airways.

Tech Stack : , NestJS, TypeScript, Google Cloud Platform, API Gateway, Firestore, Pub/Sub, Docker, Terraform, Firebase, REST APIs, OpenAPI, Microservices

What you can expect

Own production automation infrastructure. Build and maintain self-healing systems, error recovery workflows, and operational tooling that keeps critical processes running without manual intervention.

Convert operations into code. Transform manual processes and scripts into self-serve interfaces with proper validation, error handling, and rollback capabilities that operations teams can confidently use.

Design for operational independence. Create monitoring, alerts, and diagnostic tools that enable non-technical teams to understand system state, diagnose issues, and recover without engineering escalation.

Architect API solutions. Drive API design decisions, versioning strategies, service integration approaches, and API lifecycle management across the platform.

Ship quality automation and APIs. Build performant, reliable systems that serve millions of users with minimal operational overhead and excellent developer experience.

Reverse-engineer integrations. Debug and maintain stable connections to external systems, handling authentication flows, session management, and adapting to undocumented changes.

You are a good fit if you

• 2+ years professional software development experience with exposure to API design and backend development

• Demonstrated experience building and maintaining APIs in production environments, with understanding of API lifecycle fundamentals

• Comfortable with ambiguity and learning through doing. You can reverse-engineer how systems work, debug unfamiliar code, and figure things out when documentation is incomplete

• Practical debugging skills. You can trace issues through logs, reproduce problems consistently, and understand what's happening in production systems

• Ownership mindset—you're comfortable being on-call for systems you build and take pride in monitoring and improving them based on real usage

• You've built web scrapers or extensively worked with e2e tests

What we offer

• Competitive base salary

• Comprehensive benefits

• Early-stage stock options

• 4 weeks' vacation (Moving towards unlimited vacation plan)

• Flexibility to work from home or office

• Learning and development fund

Ready to build the Automation Platform that delivers visa for millions of passengers monthly?