Senior Platform Engineer

Welcome Pickups; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible work-from-home policy

L&D personal budget

Job summary

Welcome Pickups is seeking a senior backend engineer to lead scale and reliability for our in-destination travel platform. You will drive architecture decisions, performance improvements, and incident response across our Rails stack and data services in a cloud environment.

The role emphasizes backend systems, observability, security, and collaboration with product and infra teams to deliver scalable, safe journeys for travelers worldwide.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with backend and systems focus.
• BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field.
• Proven experience operating and scaling production systems.
• Travel, mobility or marketplace background with real-time operations.
• Strong understanding of system design and distributed systems.

Skills

System design

Distributed systems

Performance tuning

Observability

Security fundamentals

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science or related

Tools

Ruby on Rails

Sidekiq

Puma

PostGIS

PostgreSQL

Docker

Kubernetes

Azure Cloud

Redis

Elasticsearch

Job description

About us

Founded in 2015 in Athens, Greece, Welcome redefines the way people travel by going above and beyond the commoditized transfer service and being the first company to deliver a complete, personalised, in-destination travel experience. From the moment a traveler arrives at a new destination, until their return journey home, Welcome accommodates all their travel needs, including transfers, sightseeing trips, and local information, in the easiest, friendliest, and most personalised way possible. Welcome’s drivers are experts in the area and share their local know-how to make travellers feel at home wherever they are. The company has also introduced contactless rides, thorough cleaning protocols, and protective equipment to make every journey safe.

Being a travel tech startup, Welcome continues to grow and scale its operations and is quickly becoming a global category leader for in-destination travel services.

• One of the highest-rated global transportation companies with a rating of 4.9/5 stars.


• Expanded from 200 destinations last year to 350, achieving our ambitious 2024 growth target.


• Over 4,000 travel partners including 2,500 hotels, numerous vacation rentals, and travel agents, adding 50+ new ones every month.


• Over 2.5 million happy travellers every year.

If you want to dive deeper into the awesomeness of Welcome’s culture, click on this linkto check our TikTok account.

The Team

We are a group of vibrant, diverse people who love travelling and never settle on quality. Each one of us didn’t join Welcome by chance and believes deeply in what Welcome is trying to achieve, so we work relentlessly to make that happen. We challenge common logic, focus on design, put simplicity and usability first, and create memorable experiences. We keep learning and exploring better ways to serve our community and grow personally and professionally in our respective fields. We stay humble along the way, with a “pay it forward” mentality, but with big and bold goals.

What you’ll work with

• A large Ruby on Rails application, with Sidekiq and RabbitMQ


• A large, fast-growing PostgreSQL/PostGIS database, plus Elasticsearch and Redis


• Azure as our main cloud, with AWS S3 and Google Cloud


• Cloud66, Cloudflare, CircleCI and Docker


• New Relic and Rollbar for monitoring, and Mixpanel for product analytics


• 30+ external services, including Checkout.com, Twilio, Braze and hotel booking systems

Reliability & Uptime

• Define and track reliability targets (SLAs/SLOs) for our core flows: bookings, ride matching and payments.


• Set up and run the incident process and on-call, and reduce recovery times.


• Improve monitoring and alerting across the platform (New Relic, Rollbar).

Performance, Scalability & Data

• Lead architecture decisions for scaling our backend systems and services.




• Find and fix performance bottlenecks across the application, background jobs and database.




• Improve the performance of our large, fast-growing PostgreSQL database:

  
  
  
  
  • tune slow queries and indexes
  
  
  • plan data growth and archiving
  
  
  • manage replication, backups and restore drills
  
  
  • change large tables without downtime
  
  



• Make sure the platform handles peak season and partner growth smoothly.

Infrastructure, Security & Compliance

• Define and evolve our infrastructure strategy on Azure, and balance performance, reliability and cost.


• Define and enforce security best practices: access control, secrets management, and the security of our build and release pipeline.


• Prepare the platform for compliance: payment-data rules (PCI), GDPR, and over time SOC 2 / ISO 27001.

Developer Experience

• Improve internal tooling, CI/CD and deployment workflows so engineers can ship faster and safer.

Technical Roadmap & Collaboration

• Keep the backlog of technical work (upgrades, technical debt, performance, security) organised and ranked in Jira, and prioritise it together with the Product Manager.




• Write technical docs, runbooks and development plans, and break them into Jira tickets with clear requirements.




• Participate in team ceremonies (grooming, planning, kick-off meetings, retrospectives & demos).




• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with strong backend and systems experience.




• BS/MS degree in Computer Science or a related subject.




• Proven experience operating and scaling production systems.

Technical Skills

• Strong understanding of system design, distributed systems and performance trade-offs.


• Strong PostgreSQL skills on large databases: query and index tuning, replication, large-table migrations, backups.


• Experience with cloud infrastructure (Azure preferred), Docker and infrastructure-as-code.


• Experience with Redis, Elasticsearch and a message broker (RabbitMQ or similar) at production scale.


• Experience with observability, monitoring and incident management.


• Strong security fundamentals: access control, networking, secrets.


• CI/CD experience, including zero-downtime deploys.


• Organised and a clear writer, comfortable working in Jira.


• A hands‑on mindset: able to go from strategy to implementation.

Additional experience considered a plus

• Experience with Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq, Puma and PostGIS, or similar.




• Exposure to compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001).




• Experience with AWS or Google Cloud alongside Azure.




• Experience moving a long-running application to containers or Kubernetes.




• A travel, mobility or marketplace background with real-time operations.




• Vibrant and fresh work environment




• Flexible work-from-home policy




• The tools you need to perform your daily tasks successfully




• L&D personal budget




• +4 extra PTO days annually




• The unique opportunity to join “the next big thing” at ground level