Senior Software Development Engineer, Backend in Birmingham

Perk (formerly TravelPerk) is the intelligent platform for travel and spend management. Built to tackle the time-consuming, manual work that gets in the way of real work, our tools automate everything from travel bookings to expenses, invoice processing, and more. By eliminating this shadow work that wastes hours, erodes morale, and saps innovation, we’re on a mission to power real work, with real impact.

We’re trusted by more than 10,000 companies worldwide, including Wise, On Running, Breitling, and Fabletics, and we’re tackling the 7 hours of lost productivity per employee each week, a $1.7 trillion problem.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Pay Sustainability Engineering team, you’ll help drive the long-term reliability, scalability, and evolution of our payments, financial and billing ecosystems. The first focuses on firefighting and platform support, helping engineering teams navigate critical incidents, unblock complex technical challenges, and improve coordination across the broader payment infrastructure.

Rather than acting as a delivery team for operational work, you’ll provide technical leadership, platform-wide visibility, and guidance that helps teams resolve issues effectively and prevent recurring problems. This includes identifying technical debt, platform limitations, architectural weaknesses, and product gaps that impact the long-term health of the ecosystem.

Through strong technical leadership, systems thinking, and a focus on sustainable engineering practices, you’ll help build a healthier, more scalable payments platform that enables teams to move faster with greater confidence.

Are you a Senior Software Engineer who thrives on real ownership? This means taking responsibility for the entire lifecycle of a feature, from being part in understanding what our customers' pains are with our product team, design documents, coding to deployment, and measuring impact.

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. You'll contribute to your squad's quarterly goals and long-term vision alongside your Product Manager and Engineering Manager.

When a big change is needed in how our platform works, you'll be the one writing the design documents that lay the foundation. You'll become a guardian of your team's technical quality; your job is to make sure we're always investing our energy where it counts most.

Whether it's coordinating a cross-squad initiative, contributing to one of our engineering guilds (where engineers from different teams align on shared technical topics), or pairing with architects on solution discovery, you'll operate comfortably beyond your immediate team. You'll help Engineering Managers understand where the team needs to grow technically, and you'll use spaces like guild meetings, design doc reviews, and pairing sessions to lift the overall standard.

Architects define and uphold engineering excellence, including CI/CD optimizations, testing strategies, and coding standards across the stack. They oversee operational security, including secrets hygiene and dependency risk management, to ensure a hardened production environment.

At Perk, we take an IRL-first approach to work, where our team works together in-person 3 days a week. As such, 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. Please submit your resume in English if you choose to apply.

We will never ask you to pay for equipment, training, or fees, request sensitive personal information such as bank details early in the process, or communicate through unofficial apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal. If you receive a message claiming to be from Perk that seems suspicious, please do not respond. Forward it to security [at] perk.