Staff Software Engineer - Boston

TravelPerk; Boston (MA); Hybrid; USD 174,000 - 205,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

20 vacation days

401(k) plan with company matching

Spring Health therapy sessions

Job summary

TravelPerk is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to lead in technical vision and contribute to new product launches. This role is key to shaping engineering initiatives while ensuring a collaborative and productive work environment.

The ideal candidate will leverage their product engineering mindset and cross-team leadership skills to drive the technical direction and mentor fellow engineers. TravelPerk offers competitive compensation, including stock options and benefits like vacation days, medical plans, and a 401(k) plan.

Qualifications

• Experience in product engineering, leading end-to-end problem-solving.
• Proven ability to manage cross-team technical initiatives.
• Experience with backend-heavy systems and familiarity with tools like Python and AWS.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical vision across teams.
• Contribute to annual and quarterly planning with product managers.
• Mentor engineers and unblock delivery in teams.

Skills

Product engineering mindset

Cross‑team technical leadership

Architectural judgment

Operational maturity

Mentorship and influence

AI‑driven development

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.
• Work across multiple teams to coordinate a shared technical direction. Contribute to the creation of annual and quarterly plans with product managers, engineering managers, and other engineers — translating that into clear, actionable priorities that teams can work to today.
• Be hands‑on, with purpose.
• Spend the majority of your time actively contributing within one or two teams, while mentoring engineers, unblocking delivery, and working with dependent teams to move shared projects forward. Avoid excessive meetings or committees.
• Shape how we work, not just what we build.
• Translate higher‑level business goals into engineering approaches, propose architectural changes for scale, and ensure the team invests energy where it counts.
• Raise the bar for everyone around you.
• Support engineering through mentorship, design reviews, pairing. Explain technical complexity to the wider business and help the whole team level up their skills.
• Lead across boundaries.
• Coordinate across squads, contribute to engineering initiatives, and drive alignment across the broader organization. Connect the dots when there are dependencies or blockers.

Desired skills and experience

• Product engineering mindset: own a problem end to end — from customer problem understanding alongside product, through to deployment and measuring impact.
• Cross‑team technical leadership: coordinate multi‑team technical initiatives, manage dependencies, align stakeholders, and keep long‑horizon projects moving.
• Architectural judgment: design scalable, evolvable systems and articulate a clear technical roadmap, balancing long‑term thinking with pragmatic delivery.
• “You build it, you run it” experience: run your own services — monitoring, testing, rolling out, and operating them in production.
• Domain complexity: experience in a domain with significant underlying complexity — ideally flights or travel, but also fintech or any industry with messy, constrained systems.
• Backend‑heavy, full‑stack comfort: comfortable across backend and frontend with depth in backend. Use of Python and AWS preferred but learning agility appreciated.
• Operational maturity: experience leading observability and reliability practices; defining SLOs, handling incidents, conducting blameless post‑mortems.
• Mentorship and influence: track record of levelling up engineers through mentorship, design reviews, and modelling great engineering.
• AI‑driven development: experience or strong interest in modern AI‑augmented workflows, agentic coding and AI‑assisted code review.

AI at Perk

• AI is embedded in how we work and build. It spans the whole workflow: our Notion, Jira, GitHub and Slack are AI‑connected so you get up to speed fast. 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.
• 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.

What we offer

• Competitive compensation and equity ownership in Perk.
• 20 vacation days and 12 public holidays.
• Three medical plans to choose from, with company contributions and an HSA when enrolling in an HDHP medical plan.
• Additional comprehensive benefit plans, covering dental, vision and Wellhub’s gym subscription from the start date.
• Life and disability policies from the start date, with options to add extra protection through voluntary buy‑up plans.
• 401(k) plan with company matching contributions.
• Partner discounts on pet insurance.
• Annual summer party and other Perk events.
• Spring Health, our wellbeing partner, providing 12 therapy and 12 coaching sessions for you and loved ones.
• 12‑16 weeks paid parental leave.
• 16 paid hours per year to volunteer for charitable causes.
• Up to 20 “Work from Anywhere” days per year.
• Four‑week fully paid sabbatical once you reach 5 years.
• Relocation support to one of our hubs.

Compensation

Compensation for this role is a combination of salary and stock options. Anticipated base salary range is $174,000–$205,000 per year. Actual compensation may vary based on qualifications, experience, and other job‑related factors.

At Perk, we take an IRL‑first approach to work, where our team works together in person 3 days a week. This role requires you to be based within commuting distance of our hubs. We believe in the value of meeting in real life.

Perk is a global company with a diverse customer base, and we want people behind our product to reflect that. We’re an equal‑opportunity employer, welcoming applicants regardless of appearance, background or any other personal factor.