Senior Backend Software Engineer in London

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: London

Reporting To: Rachel Newman

Compensation: £72,000 - £90,000 / year

Go City is transforming the way people see and experience the world’s greatest destinations. We give our customers total flexibility to choose the experiences, tours and activities they want to visit at incredible savings. Every pass sale, attraction booking and partner transaction at Go City runs on systems our backend team owns. We own the whole stack that powers Go City — from our passes (pre and post purchase) to order management, from attraction lineups to reservation rules, from payment provider integration to Trade partner management. Our systems include reservations APIs, B2B reseller APIs, pass validation systems and pricing systems, to name a few.

We’re looking for a senior backend engineer who brings deep specialist expertise in at least one backend specialism and can lead complex technical work across our microservices platform.

What you'll own

• Delivery & business impact
  • Plan and own delivery of your backend projects end-to-end — design, build, release and production monitoring
  • Break ambiguous or large pieces of work into thin, releasable slices, managing dependencies with other teams to keep delivery unblocked
  • Use data and metrics to identify delivery bottlenecks, adjusting scope where needed to protect the outcome
  • Connect your technical work to the business outcomes it serves, from pass sales to partner transactions, and challenge requirements that don't serve the intended outcome
  • Build working knowledge of adjacent disciplines so you can spot problems or improvements that cross team boundaries
• Technical craft
  • Design backend solutions that span multiple services or components, documenting the trade-offs you considered
  • Produce code and designs used as the quality reference for others — testable, secure, observable and performant by default
  • Define the test strategy for work you lead, treating security, performance and accessibility as design inputs, not afterthoughts
  • Unblock colleagues on hard technical problems, including outside your immediate area when needed
• Operational excellence
  • Build observability into every change by default
  • Lead diagnosis of complex production issues through to root cause, and lead incident response for the team's services
  • Facilitate post-incident reviews and act on what comes out of them
  • Make the case for prioritising technical debt within your domain, backed by data, and improve the reliability of the release pipeline for the systems you own
• Collaboration & mentorship
  • Lead technical discussions within the team, build consensus on decisions for the work you own, and represent the team in cross-team discussions
  • Explain technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders, and work closely with Product on feature development and requirements
  • Invite challenge on your own decisions, and change course when the evidence points elsewhere
  • Mentor colleagues within the team, building depth so capability doesn't sit with one person, and give code review feedback that explains the reasoning, raising team standards as you go
  • Share knowledge more broadly across the discipline — for example through talks, guilds, or the team's regular engineering Show and Tell

What you'll bring

• Essential
  • You design backend solutions across multiple services or components, with trade-offs made explicit.
  • Your work is used as the quality reference in teams you've been part of — testable, secure, and observable by default.
  • You've owned testing, release reliability and monitoring on work you've led.
  • You're comfortable working in our stack: Java / Spring Boot, TypeScript, AWS, Kubernetes.
  • You communicate technical context clearly to engineers and non-technical stakeholders alike.
  • You mentor colleagues and raise team standards through code review feedback and knowledge sharing.
  • You unblock colleagues on hard technical problems.
• We're particularly looking for deep specialist expertise in at least one of the following:
  • Databases — PostgreSQL and/or DocumentDB: schema design, query optimisation, indexing, data modelling at scale.
  • Kafka / event streaming — topic design, consumer group management, ordering guarantees, failure handling.
  • Other backend infrastructure — equivalent depth in distributed systems, API design at scale, or platform reliability.
• Bonus, not essential
  • Experience integrating with third-party APIs or building adaptor layers.
  • Some frontend exposure (React, Node).
  • Background in travel, e-commerce, or high-throughput consumer platforms.
  • Experience with agentic AI workflows or building guardrails and evaluation systems for AI.

This role is for you if…

• "You build it, you run it" is how you already think.
• You break big problems into thin, releasable slices instinctively.
• You're the person colleagues come to for technical clarity, and you work through problems with them rather than around them.
• You give code review feedback that explains the reasoning, not just the correction.
• You invite challenge on your own decisions and change course when the evidence points elsewhere.

This may not be a good fit if you...

• Prefer clearly scoped tasks — this role involves shaping ambiguous problems before solving them.
• Work best within a single system; this role designs across multiple services and regularly coordinates across teams.
• Want a stable long-range plan — priorities shift and this role moves with them.
• Prefer to hand off once something ships.

We're a sociable team that values collaboration and time together. We come into the office on Wednesdays and Thursdays — those are our anchor days, with Tuesdays a common addition and extra days always welcome. When something complex lands, we get everyone around a whiteboard before anyone writes a line of code, and two of us at one screen is a regular sight. We organise a board game night every now and then, and there's nearly always a delicious baked treat on the table. We work in microservices and release multiple times a day. We run what we build, hold ourselves to high standards of availability, observability and security, and expect the same care in production as in code review. The Engineering department comes together regularly, with our anchor office days being shared across the whole department. We have a weekly engineering meeting for various Show and Tells, FYIs, and ADR (Architecture decision record) presentations.

On AI: our direction of travel is towards workflows where AI takes on more of the work autonomously — building the guardrails and exploring agentic approaches that make that possible. We're not fully there yet, but it's where we're heading, and we want someone who understands where this is going and brings the judgment to help us get there responsibly.

Benefits

• Annual Go City Explorer Pass allowance
• Enhanced pension contributions (5% employer)
• Life assurance: 4x your base salary
• Time off: Annual leave: 25 days + bank holidays
• Option to buy additional 5 days annual leave per year
• Upgraded Family Leave
• 1x Community day. Take a day off to give back to the community
• Work from Anywhere for up to 4 weeks per year
• Health care cash plan
• Personal Learning Budget & dedicated time for development
• EAP providing access to counselling, finance support, etc.
• Cycle to Work Scheme