Staff Software Engineer Hybrid in London

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 . Our talent team brings together leading minds from the travel and SaaS industries, representing over 70 countries. Are you a 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. You'll be working across mission-driven teams tackling core platform reliability, self-serve post-booking, booking error recovery, and airline inventory scaling. We don't have all the answers for how to get there — and we want the people we hire to help us figure that out. 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. 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'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. 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. Product engineering mindset: you work end to end — from understanding customer problems alongside product, through to deployment and measuring impact. 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. 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. ~ Backend-heavy, full-stack comfortable: our stack is roughly 80% backend, 20% frontend. We use Python and AWS; AI-driven development: experience with — or a strong interest in — modern AI-augmented workflows, including agentic coding and AI-assisted code review. 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 .