Software Engineer, Backend Developer, DevOps

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.
• You'll work across multiple teams to coordinate a shared technical direction. This means contributing to the creation of annual and quarterly plans in collaboration with product managers, engineering managers, and other engineers — and translating that into clear, actionable priorities that teams can work to today.
• Be hands-on, with purpose.
• Staff engineers at Perk are mostly hands-on — spending the majority of their time actively contributing within one or two teams, and the rest mentoring engineers, unblocking delivery, and working with dependent teams to move shared projects forward. You won't be pulled into excessive meetings or committees with a focus on impactful collaboration.
• Shape how we work, not just what we build.
• You'll take higher-level business goals and turn them into engineering approaches. That means proposing the shape of annual objectives, identifying architectural changes needed for scale, and making sure the team is investing its energy where it counts most — not just staying busy.
• Raise the bar for everyone around you.
• Staff engineers are mentors and multipliers. You'll support engineers through direct mentorship, design reviews, and pairing. You'll help explain technical complexity to the wider business — including why certain things take the time they do — and help the whole team level up their skills to better apply them to the domain.
• Your influence won't stop at your own team. You'll coordinate across squads, contribute to engineering initiatives, and drive alignment across the broader organisation. When there are dependencies or blockers, you'll be the one connecting the dots.

• Product engineering mindset: you work end to end — from understanding customer problems alongside product, through to deployment and measuring impact. Technical skill alone isn't enough; you need to be able to own a problem fully.
• Cross-team technical leadership: proven experience coordinating significant, multi-team technical initiatives where you've had to manage dependencies, align stakeholders, and keep a longer-horizon project moving.
• Architectural judgment: ability to design scalable, evolvable systems and articulate a clear technical roadmap — balancing long-term thinking with pragmatic, near-term delivery.
• “You build it, you run it” experience: you've run your own services — monitoring, testing, rolling out, and operating them in production. The tools may differ; the mindset shouldn't.
• Domain complexity: experience working in a domain with significant underlying complexity — ideally flights or travel, but also fintech or any industry where you've had to build reliable, customer-facing products on top of messy, constrained underlying systems.
• Both frontend and backend, full-stack comfortable: our stack is roughly 50% backend, 50% frontend. You should be comfortable across both, with the depth in backend systems. We use Python and AWS; we're open to people who've used different tools, as long as they can demonstrate they learn quickly.
• Operational maturity: experience leading observability and reliability…