Sr. Backend Engineer

Peek is the operating system powering the experiences industry - from museums and attractions to tours and activities. With over $7B in bookings, Peek’s AI-powered platform has helped thousands of merchants to increase revenues, save time, and deliver seamless guest experiences. Customers include MoMA, Whitney Museum, Seattle Aquarium, Bryant Park & Looping Group. The company has raised over $150 million from institutional investors Westcap, Goldman Sachs, and SpringCoast Partners. Learn more at www.peek.com http://www.peek.com. As a remote-first company recognized by Forbes as one of America's Best Startup Employers and by Built In as a 2025 and 2026 Best Place to Work, we are a global team of "Peeksters" who "Obsess Over Our Customers," "Accomplish Big Things," "Collaborate With Purpose," and "Get Better Every Day. THE ROLE We work on several systems: our ACME operations management suite, embeddable scheduling and booking widgets, B2B and B2C sales and support tooling, and custom solutions for enterprise operators. The work is technically varied and the stakes are real: operators depend on this software to run their businesses. We’re hiring a Senior Backend Engineer with strong technical depth who is also highly effective with AI-assisted development. You reason independently about complex systems, find the problems that aren't obvious from the requirements, and use AI as a tool to build faster while owning every decision it informs. That means you know how to break down ambiguous problems, delegate to agents, review their work critically, and course-correct when things go sideways. You'll join the platform team, working deep in our existing systems, including ACME Core, to make other teams faster and safer, using AI-assisted development as a force multiplier for your engineering judgment, not a replacement for it. The platform team works closely with DevOps, who own our infrastructure, so this is a backend-focused role rather than an infrastructure one. Over the past few months, we've seen a step-function improvement in the reliability and capabilities of long-running AI agents. We're adapting our engineering practice to match, and we want strong backend engineers who are already building this way and excited to push it further. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Work as part of the platform team, improving the backend systems, tooling, and practices that other teams build on. Feature development is still part of the role where it fits. - Identify automation opportunities across the engineering workflow (repetitive manual work, slow or fragile processes, recurring operational toil) and build the solutions, using AI agents where they help. - Enable other teams: build and maintain shared services, libraries, and APIs, make the right way the easy way, and unblock engineers who depend on the platform through guidance, documentation, and code review. - Own security fixes and dependency updates across our backend systems: triage vulnerabilities, plan and ship upgrades safely in an existing codebase, and make sure they don't break the teams and services that depend on them. - Identify and diagnose performance bottlenecks, and recognize scalability limits before they become production problems. - Reason about concurrency, failure modes, and reliability across APIs and integrations. - Own your services in production: monitoring, debugging, performance, and reliability. When something breaks, you get to root cause and fix it properly. - Contribute to our AI-first engineering culture, share patterns, document what works, and help the team level up on how we build with AI. - Use AI tools fluently - Claude Code, Augment or equivalent, to compress implementation time, then critically review everything that comes out of them. AI makes a strong engineer faster; it does not replace technical judgment. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR Required - 5+ years of professional backend development using Java, with a meaningful track record of shipping and operating production systems. - Strong system design: you make sound architectural decisions, think about tradeoffs, edge cases, and what happens when things scale or fail, and you know when a simple solution is enough. - Strong backend fundamentals: API design, integrations, concurrency, failure modes, and service reliability. - Deep understanding of database behavior: data modeling, query design, indexing, and the performance implications of your choices. - Proven ability to diagnose performance bottlenecks and debug complex production issues to root cause, including problems that aren't obvious from the requirements. - Comfortable working in an existing, evolving codebase: you can get up to speed quickly, make safe incremental changes, and leave things better than you found them, without defaulting to rewrites. - Hands-on, daily use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or equivalent) in a production engineering workflow, as a force multiplier on top of strong fundamentals. - Ability to critically evaluate AI-generated code: catch logic errors, identify security issues, assess maintainability, and own what gets merged regardless of how it was written. - Clear communicator: you can articulate why you made a technical choice, flag when a spec has holes, and disagree constructively. - Interest in Elixir or functional programming languages as we expand our stack NICE TO HAVES - Experience building B2B SaaS products, ideally with complex multi-tenant data models or transactional workflows. - Experience on small, high-output teams where you've had to make architectural calls without a committee. - Familiarity with frontend development and JavaScript/TypeScript (Angular or modern JS frameworks), enough to collaborate effectively with frontend engineers and understand how your APIs are consumed. - Experience on a platform, internal tooling, or developer-enablement team, including security patching and dependency upgrades in a large existing codebase. - Background in the travel, hospitality, or experiences industry. WHAT WE VALUE A few things that define how we build: - Depth first. We value engineers who understand how systems actually behave: databases, concurrency, failure modes, and performance. AI amplifies that understanding; it doesn't replace it. - Judgment over speed. AI compresses implementation time. What differentiates engineers now isn't typing speed or memorized syntax, it's the ability to make the right calls on what to build, how to build it, and when it's not ready to ship. - Ownership. You built it? You own it. That includes AI-generated code. You know when to use agents and when to do it yourself. - Directness. We want people who ask hard questions, surface problems early, and are willing to push back on a bad spec rather than build it and hope for the best. - Quality as a habit. Peer code reviews, test coverage, and clean APIs are not optional. We move fast, but not by cutting corners on the things that compound. Peek Travel Inc. is an equal-opportunity employer.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status. If you are unable to apply due to incompatible assistive technology or a disability, please contact us at talent@peek.com.  We will make every effort to respond to your request for disability assistance as soon as possible.