Senior Software Engineer - Flights

Location: Edinburgh

Employment Type: Full time

Department: Engineering

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 being part in 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 prioritise 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 travel products. Our job is to hide that complexity and deliver a seamless customer experience. We are not there yet - and that is 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. We know where we want to get to. 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.

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. You'll join a cross-functional squad where you have real ownership of a piece of Perk's domains, a genuine say in what gets built, and the autonomy to make it happen. Each team decides how to contribute to Perk's company goals. We care about impact, and we trust our people to deliver it. 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.

Some examples of what it means to be a Senior at Perk:

• Shape the bigger picture: You won't just build features, you'll refine the what to build and why. At Perk, senior engineers are expected to go beyond the technical solution and focus on the problem itself. You'll contribute to your squad's quarterly goals and long-term vision alongside your Product Manager and Engineering Manager.
• Architect for today and tomorrow: 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; spotting areas of investment, proactively managing technical debt, and making sure we don't let busy work crowd out the work that truly matters. At Perk, we believe in impact over effort: our customers see results, not the hours behind them. Your job is to make sure we're always investing our energy where it counts most.
• Lead across boundaries: Your influence won't stop at your own squad. You'll communicate complex ideas across multiple teams, proactively identify who needs to be involved, and drive alignment across the broader organisation. 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.
• Raise the bar for everyone around you: Senior engineers at Perk are mentors, coaches, and bar raisers. You'll support less experienced colleagues through direct mentorship, thoughtful feedback during reviews, and by modelling what great engineering looks like in practice. 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. At Perk, we are a team, the team's success is your success.

Desired skills and experience:

• Product Leadership: Translates complex business goals into technical roadmaps; de-risks ambiguous projects through spikes and prototyping.
• System Architecture: Architects scalable, evolvable systems and data models that account for performance, failure isolation, and long-term maintenance.
• Technical Standards: Defines and upholds engineering excellence, including CI/CD optimisations, testing strategies, and coding standards across the stack.
• Frontend Strategy: Establishes frontend architecture patterns, including state management, performance budgets, and comprehensive testing (e2e/cypress).
• Backend Excellence: Engineers sophisticated backend solutions involving API versioning, caching strategies, and complex data migration plans.
• Operational Maturity: Leads observability and SRE practices; defines SLOs, manages incident responses, and conducts blameless post-mortems.
• Security & Risk: Oversees operational security, including secrets hygiene and dependency risk management, to ensure a hardened production environment.
• Mentorship & Influence: Levels up the engineering organisation through active mentorship, leading design reviews, and influencing the product roadmap with technical data.
• Cross-Functional Impact: Coordinates multi-team deliverables and aligns stakeholders to resolve technical blockers across the organisation.
• AI-Driven Development: Experience with—or a strong interest in—modern AI-augmented workflows. This includes leveraging agentic workflows, developing custom agentic skills to extend AI capabilities, utilising AI-driven code reviews.

Location & Remote: We take an in-person 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. We're 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.