Senior Product Engineer

About us
Distribusion is the world’s leading ground transportation marketplace and gives travellers seamless access to ground transportation online, from search to ticket purchase. We have built a cutting-edge B2B technology platform that connects bus, rail, and ferry operators in 70+ countries with the biggest online retailers, including Google Maps and Booking.com.

We are shaping the future of travel and building the largest global network of transport providers and retailers. Having grown 10x in the past year, we are one of the fastest-growing startups in travel. Backed by four leading VCs (TQ Ventures, Creandum, Northzone, and Lightrock), and now, following our recent $80 m Series C, we are ready to push beyond.

The opportunity

We’re looking for an experienced Senior Product Engineer to own and evolve our core systems end-to-end. You’ll join our engineering team and work closely with product, operations, and data stakeholders across the business. Your work will power high-scale systems used by both internal operators and external users, directly impacting large volumes of real-world activity.

What you will do:

• Build a customer-facing transit schedule system that handles hundreds of thousands of bus departures daily. The system serves hundreds of thousands of travellers and is used by hundreds of operators, including operations teams, revenue managers, and planners.

• Build a ticket booking backend that allocates bus seats to travellers. Design smart allocation strategies to maximise seat usage across stops, and handle complex reallocation scenarios such as vehicle swaps, bus merges, and reinforcements.

• Build a revenue management system that dynamically prices seats based on time to departure, demand, and remaining capacity. Support carrier-controlled pricing, A/B testing, and automated pricing algorithms.

• Own and evolve the data transformation layer that powers schedules, bookings, and revenue. Design robust models, incremental pipelines, and clear semantic definitions grounded in real operational data.

• Raise data quality through strong testing, contracts, freshness checks, and monitoring so issues are detected automatically, not by stakeholders.

• Improve development workflows: CI, PR reviews, local testing, and release processes that keep iteration fast and friction low.

• Partner with stakeholders across operations, planning, and revenue. Turn ambiguous problems into clear requirements, challenge assumptions, and align solutions with real-world constraints.

• Drive improvements in tooling and practices, including AI-assisted development, better testing approaches, and scalable self-service capabilities.

Workplace:

Berlin & Hybrid: HQ office in Berlin, where the team often meets.

Remote: We are a remote-first company with teams located around the Globe.

Job requirements
Who you are:

• Several years of experience building and operating backend services in Python, with ownership across the full lifecycle: design, implementation, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance.

• Demonstrated an ownership mindset with the ability to independently drive projects, manage competing priorities, and contribute effectively across multiple systems and initiatives.

• Strong understanding of distributed systems and data-intensive applications. Experience designing systems that handle large volumes of data and traffic, with practical knowledge of consistency models, state machines, asynchronous workflows, and event-driven architectures.

• Deep database expertise: transaction management, ACID guarantees, indexing strategies, query optimisation, locking, partitioning, and sharding. You understand how database design impacts system performance and reliability at scale.

• Experience building reliable distributed systems using patterns such as outbox, idempotency, retries, and eventual consistency. Comfortable reasoning about failure modes and system behaviour under load.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals: API design, testing strategies, observability, debugging, performance optimisation, and maintaining production systems.

• Able to translate ambiguous business requirements into pragmatic technical solutions, while clearly communicating architectural trade-offs, constraints, and implementation options to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Comfortable with challenging requirements, proposing alternative approaches, and identifying opportunities to reduce complexity while maximising business impact.

• Product-minded engineer who contributes beyond implementation. You actively shape technical direction, influence product decisions, and help define the future evolution of the platform.

• Fluent in English, both verbal and written. Comfortable collaborating in a distributed team across multiple time zones, with a preference for clear written communication and asynchronous workflows.

• Experience with cloud infrastructure, messaging systems, distributed databases, and high-availability architectures is highly desirable.

What you can expect:

• Make a global impact. Help shape how millions of people discover and book ground transportation worldwide.

• Own your work. Take responsibility from day one and see the direct impact of your contributions.

• Build with the best tools. We move fast, continuously evolve our tech stack, and invest in modern, efficient solutions.

• Work with industry leaders. Our partners include Booking.com, Google Maps, Amtrak, Deutsche Bahn, Renfe, and SNCF.

• Grow with exceptional people. Join an international team that will challenge, support, and inspire you every day.

• Work your way. Enjoy flexible and remote-friendly working options, relocation opportunities, and plenty of room to grow.