Senior Python Backend Engineer Mission Critical

About Us We are a 26-year established Destination Management Company (DMC) operating under the Amstar DMC brand , the official destination services and tour operator brand of Hyatt Corporation . We support major North American travel brands including: - Apple Vacations - American Express Vacations - CheapCaribbean - Expedia - Hyatt - And more than 12 additional travel brands Our platform supports daily operational workflows for: - Transfer bookings (airport ↔ hotel) - Tours and excursions - Vacation-related services - Automated dispatch and resource allocation - Supplier coordination - Operational handling - Financials (invoicing, payments, credit card payments etc) The system automatically assigns drivers, vehicles, and partner companies required for service delivery. This is a real-time operational system used daily in production. Current System (Legacy Overview) We operate a 24-year-old Perl-based monolithic application. Codebase - ~250,000 lines total - ~100K core Perl code - 63K template toolkit - 43K configuration system - 17K Perl scripts - 25K web framework - Single monolithic architecture - Single MySQL database - 178 tables - 10 background jobs - ORM used since inception (limited direct SQL usage) Integrations - Google Drive - Gmail - FlightStats - WhatsApp - Stripe (payments) Additional workflows: - Email parsers reading Excel attachments - CSV generation & ingestion via Google Drive - Google Forms integrations - Blocking page flows in current UI Infrastructure - Hosted on DigitalOcean VPS - Ubuntu 22.10 (scheduled for upgrade) - Dev / Stage / Production environments - Python services are Dockerized - Perl system is not containerized - Partial CI/CD automation (Python only) - Infrastructure managed by current Senior Developer - Automated database backups + monthly restore testing - No replication currently - Downtime tolerance: up to 8 hours (business continuity procedures exist) Migration Status & Goal We are executing a phased migration from Perl to Python. - ~20% already migrated - Target: >80% migrated within 12 months - End goal: full replacement of legacy Perl system Current modernization streams: - Migrate email & WhatsApp handling to AI-driven solution - Rebuild core order management functionality in Python (FastAPI) - Develop new UI for drivers and hostesses - Gradually decouple monolith into modular services This is a controlled, staged production migration. Team Structure - 1 senior developer (20 years on system) - 1 QA - No dedicated DevOps - Requirements defined by business + management + senior dev - Production incidents handled by senior dev - Very stable production system (minimal incidents in last 12 months) This role will significantly strengthen and eventually take ownership of the modernization effort. Required Tec...