Staff Software Engineer - Flights

Are you a Software Engineer who thrives on real ownership?

At Perk, we know that we feel most fulfilled when we can own the problem and the solution. This means taking responsibility for the entire lifecycle of a feature, from understanding what our customers' pains are with our product team, design documents, coding to deployment, and measuring impact. You will see how your technical decisions move the needle for our customers daily.

We prioritize autonomy and pragmatism, giving you the space to solve complex problems without unnecessary friction. Engineering excellence here is measured by the reliability and simplicity of the systems you build to power a global platform.

Join the Flights team

Flights is one of Perk's fastest growing engineering areas - expanding from one team to four since 2025, with more growth ahead.

The domain is genuinely complex. A single flight booking involves far more steps, suppliers, and failure modes than most people realise. Our job is to hide that complexity and deliver a seamless customer experience. We're not there yet - and that's the opportunity.

You will be working across mission driven teams tackling core platform reliability, self serve post booking, booking error recovery, and airline inventory scaling. Each team is cross functional, so you'll work alongside product, design, and operations - not just engineers.

How we work

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.

AI at Perk

AI is embedded in how we work and what we build. On the engineering side, it spans the whole workflow: our Notion, Jira, GitHub and Slack are AI connected so you get up to speed fast, and 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.

We 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.

What it means to be a staff engineer at Perk

• Own the technical vision across teams. You'll work across multiple teams to coordinate a shared technical direction, contributing to the creation of annual and quarterly plans and translating it into actionable priorities.
• Be hands on, with purpose. Staff engineers spend the majority of their time actively contributing within one or two teams and mentoring others, unblocking delivery, and collaborating with dependent teams.
• Shape how we work, not just what we build. You'll translate higher level business goals into engineering approaches, propose architectural changes, and focus on high impact work.
• Raise the bar for everyone around you. You'll provide mentorship, design reviews, and pairing, and help the team level up skills.
• Lead across boundaries. Your influence extends beyond your own team; you'll coordinate across squads, drive alignment, and resolve dependencies.

Desired skills and experience

• Product engineering mindset: work end to end - from understanding customer problems alongside product, through to deployment and measuring impact. Technical skill alone isn't enough; you must own a problem fully.
• Cross team technical leadership: proven experience coordinating significant, multi team technical initiatives, managing dependencies, aligning stakeholders, and keeping long horizon projects moving.
• Architectural judgment: ability to design scalable, evolvable systems and articulate a clear technical roadmap, balancing long term thinking with pragmatic 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 with constrained systems.
• Backend heavy, full stack comfortable: our stack is roughly 80% backend, 20% frontend. You should be comfortable across both, with depth in backend systems. We use Python and AWS; we're open to people using different tools who can learn quickly.
• Operational maturity: experience leading observability and reliability practices; defining SLOs, handling incidents, and conducting blameless post mortems.
• Mentorship and influence: track record of levelling up engineers through mentorship and design reviews.
• AI driven development: experience or strong interest in modern AI augmented workflows, including agentic coding and AI assisted code review.

How we work (location and flexibility)

At Perk, we take an IRL first approach to work, where our team works together in person 3 days a week. This role requires you to be based within commuting distance of our hubs. For certain roles, we can help with relocation from anywhere in the world. English is the official language at the office.

Equal opportunity statement

Perk is a global company with a diverse customer base, and we want to make sure the people behind our product reflect that. We are an equal opportunity employer, which means you're welcome at Perk regardless of how you look, where you're from, or anything else that makes you, well, you.