Sr. Backend Engineer

Job description

Peek is the operating system powering the experiences industry - from museums and attractions to tours and activities. With over $7B in bookings, Peek’s AI-powered platform has helped thousands of merchants to increase revenues, save time, and deliver seamless guest experiences. Customers include MoMA, Whitney Museum, Seattle Aquarium, Bryant Park & Looping Group. The company has raised over $150 million from institutional investors Westcap, Goldman Sachs, and SpringCoast Partners. Learn more at www.peek.com http://www.peek.com. As a remote-first company recognized by Forbes as one of America's Best Startup Employers and by Built In as a 2025 and 2026 Best Place to Work, we are a global team of "Peeksters" who "Obsess Over Our Customers," "Accomplish Big Things," "Collaborate With Purpose," and "Get Better Every Day. Do you love crafting beautiful and functional customer experiences? Want to work on interesting technical problems around booking flows and payments? Do you have a passion for Elixir and functional programming with a focus on building large, complex systems at scale? Peek is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer. The ideal candidate has 5+ years of development experience with Elixir, experience working with GraphQL APIs, MySQL, and familiarity with messaging queues such as RabbitMQ. In this role you will have the opportunity to take ownership of critical product areas and use AI tools as a force multiplier on top of your strong fundamentals. Our engineering group works on several different products and systems: our Peek Pro operations management suite, embeddable scheduling & booking flows, and custom development services for our enterprise customers. This role will primarily focus on supporting the workflows used directly by Peek’s customers and improving overall system performance, security, and reliability. We’re hiring a Senior Backend Engineer who works AI-first. That means you treat AI as a core part of how you build software and break down ambiguous problems, including delegating tasks to agents, reviewing their work critically, and course-correcting when things go sideways. You'll design and operate complex agent orchestration systems, develop patterns for human-agent collaboration, and ship real product features primarily through agent-assisted development in collaboration with human colleagues. We work collaboratively, move fast, and value technical quality. If you are excited about the challenge of building an incredible product while working alongside a great engineering team, we’d love to hear from you! What we’re looking for - Strong backend fundamentals in Elixir: API design, data modeling, SQL, service reliability, and debugging production issues. - Emphasis on creating scalable and reliable backend systems that integrate seamlessly with multiple services and products with an attention to high-quality code. - A drive for exploring and leading new approaches to complex problems via collaboration with multiple stakeholders across Product, Design, and Engineering, particularly amongst one’s peers. - Adaptability to the changing tech industry: demonstrated daily use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or equivalent) in a production engineering workflow. - Ability to evaluate AI-generated code critically: you catch logic errors, identify security issues, assess maintainability, and own what gets merged regardless of how it was written. - Strong system design instincts: you think about tradeoffs, edge cases, and what happens when things scale or fail. - Clear and empathetic communicator: you flag when a spec has holes, you can articulate why you made a technical choice, you enjoy collaboration and seek to understand different perspectives, and you are constructive in any disagreements. - Self-motivation and ownership: you will push your work forward without prompting and look for ways to unblock yourself and the team on business priorities; you enjoy ownership over your work and seeing code through from conception to production. Skills you already have - 5+ years of professional development using Elixir and/or Ruby. Elixir experience is a hard requirement. - Solid coding practices including peer code reviews, unit testing, continuous integration, TDD, etc. - Experience with relational and/or non-relational databases - Strong understanding of AI tools and ability to identify pitfalls and course-correct AI-generated code based on deep knowledge of the fundamentals of building production software. - Experience being on an on-call rotation and willingness to help with occasional production issues outside of work hours when on-call. Nice to haves - Experience working with Ruby - Experience working with GraphQL APIs. - Experience with message queues such as RabbitMQ - Experience working on B2B software, on booking flows, or in the travel industry. Peek Travel Inc. is an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status. If you are unable to apply due to incompatible assistive technology or a disability, please contact us at talent@peek.com. We will make every effort to respond to your request for disability assistance as soon as possible.