Sr. Backend Engineer - Peek

Peek is the operating system for the experiences industry, powering museums, attractions, tours, and activities. With over $7B in bookings, Peek’s AI-powered platform helps thousands of merchants increase revenues, save time, and deliver seamless guest experiences. Notable customers include MoMA, Whitney Museum, Seattle Aquarium, Bryant Park, and Looping Group. The company has raised over $150 million from investors like Westcap, Goldman Sachs, and SpringCoast Partners. Learn more at 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" guided by values such as "Obsess Over Our Customers," "Accomplish Big Things," "Collaborate With Purpose," and "Get Better Every Day."

The Role

Peek's engineering team works on a diverse set of systems, including:

• Our ACME operations management suite
• Embeddable scheduling and booking widgets
• B2B and B2C sales and support tooling
• Custom solutions for enterprise operators

The work is technically varied and critical, as operators rely on this software to run their businesses.

We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer with strong technical depth and high effectiveness in AI-assisted development. You will be expected to reason independently about complex systems, identify non-obvious problems, and leverage AI as a tool to accelerate development while maintaining full ownership of all informed decisions. This includes breaking down ambiguous problems, delegating to AI agents, critically reviewing their output, and course-correcting as needed.

You will join the platform team, working deeply within our existing systems, including ACME Core. Your goal will be to enhance the speed and safety of other engineering teams, utilizing AI-assisted development as a force multiplier for your engineering judgment. This is a backend-focused role, working closely with DevOps who manage our infrastructure, rather than an infrastructure role.

We have observed significant improvements in the reliability and capabilities of long-running AI agents and are evolving our engineering practices accordingly. We are looking for strong backend engineers who are already proficient in this approach and eager to advance it further.

What You'll Do

• Work within the platform team to enhance backend systems, tooling, and practices that other teams rely on. Feature development will be included where appropriate.
• Identify and implement automation opportunities within the engineering workflow, addressing repetitive manual tasks, slow or fragile processes, and recurring operational toil, leveraging AI agents as beneficial.
• Enable other teams by building and maintaining shared services, libraries, and APIs, promoting best practices, and unblocking engineers through guidance, documentation, and code reviews.
• Manage security fixes and dependency updates across backend systems, including triaging vulnerabilities, planning and safely shipping upgrades in an existing codebase, and ensuring compatibility with dependent teams and services.
• Identify and diagnose performance bottlenecks, and proactively recognize scalability limits to prevent production issues.
• Apply strong reasoning to concurrency, failure modes, and reliability across APIs and integrations.
• Take ownership of your services in production, including monitoring, debugging, performance, and reliability. Address root causes and implement lasting fixes for production incidents.
• Contribute to our AI-first engineering culture by sharing patterns, documenting effective strategies, and helping the team advance its AI-driven development capabilities.
• Fluently use AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Augment) to accelerate implementation time, while critically reviewing all generated output. Understand that AI enhances a strong engineer's speed but does not replace technical judgment.

What We're Looking For (Required)

• 5+ years of professional backend development experience using Java, with a proven track record of shipping and operating production systems.
• Strong system design skills: Ability to make sound architectural decisions, consider tradeoffs, edge cases, scalability, and failure scenarios, and discern when a simple solution is sufficient.
• Strong backend fundamentals: Expertise in API design, integrations, concurrency, failure modes, and service reliability.
• Deep understanding of database behavior: Proficiency in data modeling, query design, indexing, and the performance implications of your choices.
• Proven ability to diagnose performance bottlenecks and debug complex production issues to their root cause, including problems not immediately obvious from requirements.
• Comfortable working in an existing, evolving codebase: Ability to quickly onboard, make safe incremental changes, and improve code quality without resorting to rewrites.
• Hands-on, daily use of AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) in a production engineering workflow, leveraging them as a force multiplier on top of strong fundamentals.
• Ability to critically evaluate AI-generated code: Skill in identifying logic errors, security issues, and maintainability concerns, taking full ownership of merged code regardless of its origin.
• Clear communicator: Ability to articulate technical choices, identify specification gaps, and engage in constructive disagreement.
• Interest in Elixir or functional programming languages as we expand our technology stack.

Nice to Haves

• Experience building B2B SaaS products, particularly with complex multi-tenant data models or transactional workflows.
• Experience in small, high-output teams where architectural decisions were made autonomously.
• Familiarity with frontend development (JavaScript/TypeScript, Angular, or modern JS frameworks) sufficient to collaborate effectively with frontend engineers and understand API consumption.
• 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

Our engineering culture is defined by:

• Depth First: We value engineers who deeply understand how systems behave, including databases, concurrency, failure modes, and performance. AI amplifies this understanding but does not replace it.
• Judgment Over Speed: While AI compresses implementation time, we believe that what truly differentiates engineers is the ability to make sound judgments on what to build, how to build it, and when it's ready to ship, rather than just typing speed or memorized syntax.
• Ownership: If you build it, you own it—this includes AI-generated code. We expect engineers to know when to leverage AI agents and when to handle tasks manually.
• Directness: We encourage individuals who ask challenging questions, surface problems early, and are willing to push back on flawed specifications rather than proceeding blindly.
• Quality as a Habit: Peer code reviews, comprehensive test coverage, and clean APIs are fundamental and non-negotiable. We prioritize moving fast without compromising on quality.

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 require disability assistance to apply, please contact us at talent@peek.com. We will make every effort to respond to your request as soon as possible.