Staff 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 understanding what our customers' pains are with our product team, design documents, coding, 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 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’ll 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. 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. This means contributing to the creation of annual and quarterly plans in collaboration with product managers, engineering managers, and other engineers — and translating that into clear, actionable priorities that teams can work to today.
• Be hands‑on, with purpose. 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 won’t be pulled into excessive meetings or committees with a focus on impactful collaboration.
• Shape how we work, not just what we build. 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. Staff engineers are mentors and multipliers. 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.
• Lead across boundaries. Your influence won’t stop at your own team. You’ll coordinate across squads, contribute to engineering initiatives, and drive alignment across the broader organisation. When there are dependencies or blockers, you’ll be the one connecting the dots.

Desired skills and experience:

• Product engineering mindset: you work end to end — from understanding customer problems alongside product, through to deployment and measuring impact. Technical skill alone isn’t enough; you need to be able to own a problem fully.
• 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. 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 where you’ve had to build reliable, customer‑facing products on top of messy, 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 who’ve used different tools, as long as they can demonstrate they learn quickly.
• Operational maturity: experience leading observability and reliability practices; defining SLOs, handling incidents, and conducting blameless post‑mortems.
• Mentorship and influence: a track record of levelling up engineers around you through mentorship, design reviews, and by modeling what great engineering looks like.
• AI‑driven development: experience with — or a strong interest in — modern AI‑augmented workflows, including agentic coding and AI‑assisted code review.

How We Work: 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. We fundamentally believe in the value of meeting in real life to improve connectivity, productivity, creativity and ultimately making us a great place to work. 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. Do not forget to submit an updated portfolio and or resume. Perk is a global company with a diverse customer base, and we want to make sure the people behind our product reflect that. 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.