Staff Software Engineer

Perk; Massachusetts; On-site; USD 174,000 - 215,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation & equity

20 vacation days + 12 holidays

Multiple medical plans with HSA

Life and disability coverage

401(k) with company match

Relocation support

Work from Anywhere days

Annual company events

Job summary

Perk seeks a Staff Software Engineer to expand its engineering footprint in North America and help launch a new product from the ground up. You will own the technical vision across teams, coordinate multi-team initiatives, and stay hands-on while mentoring others.

You’ll shape yearly objectives and drive architectural changes for scale, partnering with product managers and engineers. You will work across frontend and backend with Python and AWS, aligning dependencies and delivering high-impact

Qualifications

• End-to-end product engineering ownership from problem understanding to deployment.
• Experience coordinating multi-team technical initiatives with stakeholders.
• Strong architectural judgment for scalable systems and clear roadmaps.
• Hands-on in production services: monitoring, testing, deployment.
• Experience with backend systems and frontend balance; learn quickly.
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Responsibilities

• Own the technical vision across teams and translate business goals into actionable priorities.
• Coordinate across squads to align dependencies and drive delivery.
• Be hands-on, mentoring engineers and reviewing designs.
• Shape annual objectives and architectural changes for scale.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration with product and engineering managers.

Skills

Product engineering mindset

Cross-team technical leadership

Architectural judgment

Hands-on operator

Domain complexity

Full-stack (frontend & backend)

Operational maturity

Mentorship & influence

AI-driven development

Tools

Python

AWS

Job description

Perk is growing its engineering footprint in North America, and we're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help us do it right. You'll play a central role in a new product launch as Perk continues its expansion - a rare chance to shape something from the ground up.

How we work:

At Perk, we believe the best work happens when great people come together in small teams with a shared sense of purpose. Each team has real ownership of its domain, a genuine say in what gets built, and the autonomy to make it happen. We care about impact, and we trust our people to deliver it.

What it means to be a Staff Engineer at Perk:

• Own the technical vision across teams.
• You'll work across multiple teams to coordinate a shared technical direction. This means contributing to the creation of annual and quarterly plans in collaboration with product managers, engineering managers, and other engineers — and translating that into clear, actionable priorities that teams can work to today.
• Be hands-on, with purpose.
• Staff engineers at Perk are mostly hands-on — spending the majority of their time actively contributing within one or two teams, and the rest mentoring engineers, unblocking delivery, and working with dependent teams to move shared projects forward. You won't be pulled into excessive meetings or committees with a focus on impactful collaboration.
• Shape how we work, not just what we build.
• You'll take higher-level business goals and turn them into engineering approaches. That means proposing the shape of annual objectives, identifying architectural changes needed for scale, and making sure the team is investing its energy where it counts most — not just staying busy.
• Raise the bar for everyone around you.
• Staff engineers are mentors and multipliers. You'll support engineers through direct mentorship, design reviews, and pairing. You'll help explain technical complexity to the wider business — including why certain things take the time they do — and help the whole team level up their skills to better apply them to the domain.
• Your influence won't stop at your own team. You'll coordinate across squads, contribute to engineering initiatives, and drive alignment across the broader organisation. When there are dependencies or blockers, you'll be the one connecting the dots.

Desired skills and experience:

• Product engineering mindset: you work end to end — from understanding customer problems alongside product, through to deployment and measuring impact. Technical skill alone isn't enough; you need to be able to own a problem fully.
• Cross-team technical leadership: proven experience coordinating significant, multi-team technical initiatives where you've had to manage dependencies, align stakeholders, and keep a longer-horizon project moving.
• Architectural judgment: ability to design scalable, evolvable systems and articulate a clear technical roadmap — balancing long-term thinking with pragmatic, near-term delivery.
• “You build it, you run it” experience: you've run your own services — monitoring, testing, rolling out, and operating them in production. The tools may differ; the mindset shouldn't.
• Domain complexity: experience working in a domain with significant underlying complexity — ideally flights or travel, but also fintech or any industry where you've had to build reliable, customer-facing products on top of messy, constrained underlying systems.
• Both frontend and backend, full-stack comfortable: our stack is roughly 50% backend, 50% frontend. You should be comfortable across both, with the depth in backend systems. We use Python and AWS; we're open to people who've used different tools, as long as they can demonstrate they learn quickly.
• Operational maturity: experience leading observability and reliability practices; defining SLOs, handling incidents, and conducting blameless post-mortems.
• Mentorship and influence: a track record of levelling up engineers around you through mentorship, design reviews, and by modelling what great engineering looks like.
• AI-driven development: experience with — or a strong interest in — modern AI-augmented workflows, including agentic coding and AI-assisted code review.

What we offer:

• Receive competitive compensation and equity ownership in Perk
• Rest and recharge with our generous allocation of 20 vacation days and 12 public holidays
• Enjoy the flexibility of three medical plans to choose from, with company contributions and an HSA when enrolling in an HDHP medical plan
• Take control of your physical health with additional comprehensive benefit plans, covering dental, vision and Wellhub's gym subscription from your start date
• Rest assured that you're covered by life and disability policies from your start date, with options to add extra protection through voluntary buy-up plans
• Plan for your future with our 401(k) plan with company matching contributions
• Care for your furry friends through partner discounts on pet insurance
• Join our unforgettable Perk events, including our spectacular annual summer party
• Always feel supported with Spring Health, our market-leading wellbeing partner, providing fast, comprehensive access to 12x therapy and 12x coaching sessions for you and your loved ones
• Focus on your family with 12-16 weeks' paid parental leave
• Contribute to your community with 16 paid hours per year to spend volunteering for your dearest charitable causes
• Broaden your horizons with up to 20 "Work from Anywhere" days per year
• Follow your passions and take a four-week, fully paid sabbatical once you reach 5 years
• Let us help you move to one of our hubs with relocation support

Compensation

Compensation for this role is a combination of salary and stock options. The anticipated base salary range is $174,000 - $215,000 per year. Actual compensation may vary based on specific qualifications, experience, and other job-related factors.

• AI is embedded in how we work and what we build. It spans the whole workflow: our Notion, Jira, GitHub and Slack are AI-connected so you get up to speed fast, and day-to-day it helps with specifying features, writing and reviewing code, and automated AI PR review on every pull request. When something goes wrong in production, AI surfaces context across systems quickly. We also embrace agentic coding, using AI as an active collaborator, not just a prompt-by-prompt co-pilot.
• We expect candidates to use AI tools in our coding interviews. The bar is understanding your code and owning what you produce. That reflects how we work every day.