Senior Backend Engineer

About Packfleet

At Packfleet we’re on a mission to empower independent businesses across the UK to offer the best deliveries on Earth. We’re bringing the experience of receiving a package into the 2020s with modern tech, real-time tracking and updates, seamless integrations and great customer experience.

About the role

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our team. You'll be pragmatic, have a product-mindset, keeping users at the heart of how you think, and have a passion for solving problems

Since 2021, we’ve built systems that power the entire journey of a Packfleet delivery. From integrating with e-commerce and shipment management systems, to tooling that powers our entire day to day operations and vehicle routing, to building scalable systems as we expand Nationwide, there’s no shortage of interesting and challenging problems in the space we’re in.

As an engineer in our small team, this is a unique opportunity for you to help shape what we build, and the way we build it. There’s still so much to do and learn, in every aspect of Packfleet — we’re only just getting started!

Where we’re based

This is a hybrid-remote role, based at our office & warehouse in Bermondsey, London (10 min walk from South Bermondsey station).

We aim to spend at least 2 days / week together in the office and work remotely the rest of the time. This keeps us close to the drivers, hub and the operational side of our business with the added flexibility of remote working.

Visas

We are able to sponsor visas for this role.

What you will do:

• Understand the needs of our merchants, recipients, operations teams, drivers, and hub staff, to lead the way in building high quality engineering solutions that solve their problems
• Write robust, maintainable and scalable code and help others do the same
• Take the initiative where it makes sense to level up our backend platform and help us scale
• Share your opinions on engineering, operational problems, hiring, etc. and give feedback to others to help us do the best we can
• Occasionally go out with drivers to do deliveries or handle packages in the depot, to get an end-to-end understanding of the problems we're trying to solve

🛠 Engineering at Packfleet

We have a strong, ownership-driven product and engineering culture at Packfleet. We don't have product managers – engineers and designers work collaboratively, make decisions quickly, and ship product improvements multiple times per day. You’ll have a strong say in what and how we build, with meaningful impact across the whole company.

We use modern technology that belongs in the 2020s, and stay up to date with advances in technology as a team. We actively encourage using AI / LLM based technology to help us ship faster and higher quality products, and offer a license to Gen AI editors like Cursor, Copilot or Supermaven to help you do your job.

Some of the tech we use:

• A service-oriented backend, using a combination of TypeScript + NodeJS and Rust (where performance matters), running on Google Cloud Platform + Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
• Postgres as our main database, and BigQuery for our analytics pipeline
• End-to-end type-safe APIs with GraphQL / Protobuf interfaces and zod validation
• Our own custom vehicle router built in Rust that plans routes for thousands of deliveries per day, and integrates with mapping, property and live & historical traffic data
• Github Actions + Vercel for automated deployments multiple times per day
• NextJS frontend running on Vercel, using latest frontend technologies like TailwindCSS, Biome, shadcn and Radix UI libraries, and React-email
• React Native, powering our cross-platform driver app

💚 Our commitment to diversity

We care deeply about creating a diverse team so we particularly encourage applications from people from different underrepresented demographics and encourage you, regardless of your background and past experience, to apply if the role excites you.

If we want to solve problems for people across the UK (and one day around the world), our team has to represent those we’re solving them for. So we need to attract the best talent and create an environment that supports and includes them.

You should apply if:

• For this high-impact role, we’d expect you to have 5+ years of experience of backend development. Experience working with NodeJS / TypeScript on the backend is a bonus.
• You’re comfortable making trade-offs between moving quickly vs taking the time to architect things properly, based on the problem at hand.
• You’re comfortable working without a dedicated product manager and owning a problem end-to-end, involving the right people from other teams to come to a solution
• You can get hands-on in a startup environment. We’re still a small team so you’ll probably be involved in everything to a degree, and we encourage going out to do deliveries or work in our hub once every few months in the team to experience what our drivers and hub staff experience.
• You care about the team and culture we are building, and understand the importance of giving feedback and supporting others around you.

What you’ll get:

• A salary of £90,000 - £120,000 (based on level/seniority) alongside meaningful equity in Packfleet.
• Experience in a close knit environment with a team of folks from companies like Monzo, Citymapper, SkyScanner, Apple and Amazon.
• Benefits like health insurance, mental health days-off, a £1000/year learning budget, internally-transparent salaries and 35 days holiday (inc. bank holidays) with top-ups & unpaid holiday if you need more.
• A “Recharge Day” on the last Friday of every month: a day to spend doing something you enjoy with others in the team. This can be anything from an escape room, crazy golf, climbing, to wine tasting.
• £30 / month to spend on Packfleet merchants, supporting independant business and getting the Packfleet experience first hand.
• The equipment you need to do your best work (e.g. top-spec MacBook Pro, 4K screen, AI assistants & tools)