Senior Software Engineer Platform

🚀 Why Headout?

Were a rocketship: 9-figure revenue, record growth, and profitable

With $130M in revenue, guests in 100+ cities, and 18 months of profitability, Headout is the fastest-growing marketplace in the travel industry, and were just getting started. Weve raised $60M+ from top-tier investors and are building a durable company for the long term — because thats what our mission needs and deserves. Were growing, profitable and nowhere near done.

What we do is important

In an increasingly digital world, there is a desperate need to augment our human experience by getting us to interact with the real world around us and the people in it. At Headout, our mission is to be the easiest, fastest, and most delightful way to head out to a real-life experience — from immersive tours to museums to live events and everything in between.

Why now?

The foundation is strong. The opportunity ahead is even bigger. Weve hit profitability, built momentum, and proven the model — but theres so much more to build. If youre looking to join a company where the trajectory is steep and your impact is real, this is the moment.

Our culture

Reinventing the travel industry isnt easy, but thats the fun part.

We care deeply about ownership, craft, and impact, and were here to do the best work of our careers. We wont pretend like its for everyone but if youre a builder who loves solving tough problems, youll feel right at home. Read more about our unique values here: https://bit.ly/HeadoutPlaybook

👩 💻The Role

As a Senior Software Engineer in the Platform Team, you will be responsible for infrastructure management, working with Kubernetes clusters on cloud and optimizing workloads on the clusters. The role includes CI/CD pipelines, building reusable workflows with GitHub Actions (or similar), canary releases and related tasks. It also involves observability, designing service level dashboards, fine tuning alerts and managing incidents across the org. You will work on application performance by designing, implementing and rolling out changes in backends to boost API and page performance, improve database efficiency and fix bottlenecks. You will contribute to platform tools by architecting and building scalable and efficient platforms for cross pod usecases. The role also includes improving developer velocity by building tools and workflows to improve velocity and efficiency across the engineering teams. Security responsibilities include building guard rails on security practices and the standardisation of them. You will also support mentorship by collaborating with and mentoring juniors, driving RCAs and pushing for best practices across the organization.

🤩What makes this role special?

• Full Platform exposure - Work on problem statements encompassing DevOps, Application Performance, Observability and many more.
• Architecture Decisions - Directly influence how we evolve our stack with benchmarks and relevant metrics.
• High Impact - Build tools that reduces deployment TAT, boosts p99s etc - metrics the whole company celebrates.
• Flexible - Flexibility to work on different stacks, tools & platforms.

💝What skills & experience do you need?

• 3-5 years of experience in operating customer facing services at scale.
• Proficiency in operating, debugging & optimising Kubernetes Clusters & its workloads
• Experience in any service mesh & tracing tools like Istio, Jaeger etc.
• Comfortable working with any Cloud Provider - AWS,GCP, Azure etc. Preferably AWS.
• Hands on with monitoring & alerting stacks - Prometheus + Grafana + Thanos, NewRelic/Datadog.
• Designed robust CI/CD workflows in any platform - Github, GitLab, Jenkins etc.
• Proficiency in IaC with Terraform or Pulumi.
• Fluency in Python, Go or Java/Kotlin languages & shell scripting.
• Experience working with databases like mysql, mongodb etc.
• Ability to profile applications, DB queries and tracing.
• Understanding of Security best practices and compliance requirements.
• High Agency to proactively identify and fix issues.

➕Bonus

• Interested in travel, local experiences, and hospitality personally.
• Interested in being in a rapidly growing start-up.
• Anything out-of-the-box that can surprise us.