Senior Platform Engineer

Employers from Greece

United States

Hybrid

USD 150,000 - 210,000

Full time

4 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

Vibrant and fresh work environment

Flexible work-from-home policy

Tools to perform daily tasks

L&D personal budget

+4 extra PTO days annually

Opportunity to join next big thing at,

Job summary

Welcome Pickups in the United States is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to keep our core platform reliable, fast, scalable, and secure, supporting travellers, drivers and partners.

You will lead architecture decisions, optimize PostgreSQL databases, manage cloud infrastructure (Azure preferred with AWS/GCP), and enhance CI/CD and deployment workflows to help product teams move fast without breaking things.

Qualifications

8+ years of software engineering experience with backend and systems focus.
BS/MS degree in Computer Science or a related subject.
Proven experience operating and scaling production systems.

Responsibilities

Define and track reliability targets (SLAs/SLOs) for core flows like bookings, ride matching and payments.
Set up incident processes and on-call, reducing recovery times.
Improve monitoring and alerting across the platform.
Lead architecture decisions for scaling backend systems and services.
Find and fix performance bottlenecks across app, background jobs and database.
Improve PostgreSQL performance: tune queries and indexes, plan data growth, manage backups.
Define and evolve Azure-based infrastructure with security and cost in mind.
Ensure CI/CD supports zero-downtime deploys and developer efficiency.
Collaborate with Product, write runbooks and Jira tickets with clear requirements.
Participate in planning, grooming, kick-offs, retrospectives and demos.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

PostgreSQL

Cloud infra

Docker

Redis

Elasticsearch

RabbitMQ

CI/CD

Security basics

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science or related

Tools

Docker

Redis

Elasticsearch

RabbitMQ

PostgreSQL

Azure

AWS

GCP

CI/CD

Job description

at Welcome Pickups

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.

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.

As a Senior Platform Engineer at Welcome Pickups, you will keep the platform behind our product reliable, fast, scalable and secure, so travellers, drivers and partners can count on our services every day. Much of what we do runs in the background: matching rides to drivers, pricing, notifications, partner syncs and payouts. If the platform slows down or stops, rides don't get assigned and travellers end up waiting at arrivals. This is a hands-on role that works across all our product teams. You will make key architecture and infrastructure decisions, set the standards everyone builds to, and own the technical roadmap together with the Product Manager of the Core team. The role is about helping product teams move fast without breaking things, not slowing them down.

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

Responsibilities

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).

Requirements

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