Peek - Sr. Backend Engineer

• 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 • 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 • 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.