Software Engineer - Boston

Perk is growing its engineering footprint in North America, and we're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help us do it right. You'll play a central role in a new product launch as Perk continues its expansion — a rare chance to shape something from the ground up.

At Perk, we believe the best work happens when great people come together in small teams with a shared sense of purpose. Each team has real ownership of its domain, a genuine say in what gets built, and the autonomy to make it happen. We care about impact, and we trust our people to deliver it.

• Own the technical vision across teams.
• Work across multiple teams to coordinate a shared technical direction. Contribute to the creation of annual and quarterly plans with product managers, engineering managers, and other engineers — translating that into clear, actionable priorities that teams can work to today.
• Be hands‑on, with purpose.
• Spend the majority of your time actively contributing within one or two teams, while mentoring engineers, unblocking delivery, and working with dependent teams to move shared projects forward. Avoid excessive meetings or committees.
• Shape how we work, not just what we build.
• Translate higher‑level business goals into engineering approaches, propose architectural changes for scale, and ensure the team invests energy where it counts.
• Raise the bar for everyone around you.
• Support engineering through mentorship, design reviews, pairing. Explain technical complexity to the wider business and help the whole team level up their skills.
• Lead across boundaries.
• Coordinate across squads, contribute to engineering initiatives, and drive alignment across the broader organization. Connect the dots when there are dependencies or blockers.

• Product engineering mindset: own a problem end to end — from customer problem understanding alongside product, through to deployment and measuring impact.
• Cross‑team technical leadership: coordinate multi‑team technical initiatives, manage dependencies, align stakeholders, and keep long‑horizon projects moving.
• Architectural judgment: design scalable, evolvable systems and articulate a clear technical roadmap, balancing long‑term thinking with pragmatic delivery.
• “You build it, you run it” experience: run your own services — monitoring, testing, rolling out, and operating them in production.
• Domain complexity: experience in a domain with significant underlying complexity — ideally flights or travel, but also fintech or any industry with messy, constrained systems.
• Backend‑heavy, full‑stack comfort: comfortable across backend and frontend with depth in backend. Use of Python and AWS preferred but learning agility appreciated.
• Operational maturity: experience leading observability and reliability practices; defining SLOs, handling incidents, conducting blameless post‑mortems.
• Mentorship and influence: track record of levelling up engineers through mentorship, design reviews, and modelling great engineering.
• AI‑driven development: experience or strong interest in modern AI‑augmented workflows, agentic coding and AI‑assisted code review.

• AI is embedded in how we work and build. It spans the whole workflow: our Notion, Jira, Git Hub and Slack are AI‑connected so you get up to speed fast. Day‑to‑day it helps with specifying features, writing and reviewing code, and automated AI PR review on every pull request. When something goes wrong in production, AI surfaces context across systems quickly.
  
  We also embrace agentic coding, using AI as an active collaborator, not just a prompt‑by‑prompt co‑pilot.
• Expect candidates to use AI tools in our coding interviews. The bar is understanding your code and owning what you produce; that reflects how we work every day.

• Competitive compensation and equity ownership in Perk.
• 20 vacation days and 12 public holidays.
• Three medical plans to choose from, with company contributions and an HSA when enrolling in an HDHP medical plan.
• Additional comprehensive benefit plans, covering dental, vision and Wellhub’s gym subscription from the start date.
• Life and disability policies…