Sr. Backend Engineer

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.

THE ROLE

We work on several systems: our ACME operations management suite, embeddable scheduling and booking widgets, B2B and B2C sales and support tooling, and custom solutions for enterprise operators. The work is technically varied and the stakes are real: operators depend on this software to run their businesses.

We’re hiring a Senior Backend Engineer with strong technical depth who is also highly effective with AI-assisted development. You reason independently about complex systems, find the problems that aren't obvious from the requirements, and use AI as a tool to build faster while owning every decision it informs. That means you know how to break down ambiguous problems, delegate to agents, review their work critically, and course-correct when things go sideways. You'll join the platform team, working deep in our existing systems, including ACME Core, to make other teams faster and safer, using AI-assisted development as a force multiplier for your engineering judgment, not a replacement for it. The platform team works closely with DevOps, who own our infrastructure, so this is a backend-focused role rather than an infrastructure one.

Over the past few months, we've seen a step-function improvement in the reliability and capabilities of long-running AI agents. We're adapting our engineering practice to match, and we want strong backend engineers who are already building this way and excited to push it further.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Work as part of the platform team, improving the backend systems, tooling, and practices that other teams build on. Feature development is still part of the role where it fits.

• Identify automation opportunities across the engineering workflow (repetitive manual work, slow or fragile processes, recurring operational toil) and build the solutions, using AI agents where they help.

• Enable other teams: build and maintain shared services, libraries, and APIs, make the right way the easy way, and unblock engineers who depend on the platform through guidance, documentation, and code review.

• Own security fixes and dependency updates across our backend systems: triage vulnerabilities, plan and ship upgrades safely in an existing codebase, and make sure they don't break the teams and services that depend on them.

• Identify and diagnose performance bottlenecks, and recognize scalability limits before they become production problems.

• Reason about concurrency, failure modes, and reliability across APIs and integrations.

• Own your services in production: monitoring, debugging, performance, and reliability. When something breaks, you get to root cause and fix it properly.

• Contribute to our AI-first engineering culture, share patterns, document what works, and help the team level up on how we build with AI.

• Use AI tools fluently - Claude Code, Augment or equivalent, to compress implementation time, then critically review everything that comes out of them. AI makes a strong engineer faster; it does not replace technical judgment.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Required

• 5+ years of professional backend development using Java, with a meaningful track record of shippi