Senior Backend Engineer

ABOUT US

About JustPark

JustPark, established in 2006, is the UK’s favourite parking app, parking a car every 2 seconds and processing £100m+ of parking income for our partners each year. With 13 million drivers and more than 250,000 spaces, we’re proud to work with some of the UK’s biggest Local Authorities, hotel chains and car park operators. JustPark markets and monetises both unused residential driveways and under-utilised car park capacity, benefitting drivers and creating revenue for space owners. 

Uniquely in the industry, we focus on both the driver and the operator experience to make parking better for all stakeholders. In addition to working with traditional parking real-estate,  we also work with 10,000s of independent landlords and small businesses. We pride ourselves in our ability to provide exceptional service, a smooth onboarding process and being on the cutting edge of innovation. 

About ParkHub

Founded in 2010, ParkHub is the US’s leading event parking technology provider powering the largest venues and stadiums. This includes over 70% of pro-sports teams and managing over $3bn in revenue on their platform. ParkHub is optimising the world’s journeys by providing cutting-edge enterprise technology to support  the global parking industry. The company’s products offer contactless payment options, real-time operational data, robust performance analytics, and leading integrations with ticketing and parking reservation providers.

Our merged organisation

Following the merger in April 2024, JustPark and ParkHub now form one of the largest parking organisations globally, serving over 20 million drivers and more than 500 B2B customers, with a combined booking volume exceeding $1 billion. 

Whereas before, JustPark was purely an expert in consumer parking reservations and on-demand payments, as a combined business we are now also market leaders in providing best-in-class venue and event parking management services and business intelligence. This makes 2024 a hugely exciting time to join our business and we are looking for new team members that will help us execute on the opportunity now in front of us. 

ABOUT THE ROLE

This position is all about building a backend that delivers new tools and products to 10 million users, building solutions that ensure our customers experience a world-class service from our products.

As a senior engineer, you will get to contribute to key architectural decisions that shape the future of the stack at scale. You’ll also be expected to take charge of technical delivery and guide the more junior members of the team around you as we work together daily.

This role is best suited for those with experience in developing and scaling complex systems, rather than primarily working on templated or small-scale projects.

ABOUT OUR TECH STACK

We use Laravel 10 and PHP 8.1 as our daily drivers. Our current architecture is fairly monolithic, predominantly sat in Laravel as our main API and remnants of legacy desktop. We have a bunch of surrounding services written in Go, Java, Python and Node also, state is held in Redis, MySQL and PostgreSQL. Primarily the surrounding microservices are written in Go (around 25) with some legacy Java/Python services.

We operate in a cloud environment, utilising Google Cloud, and our infrastructure is cloud native - our entire production, staging and development stack is kubernetes and docker. 

We work to agile methodologies. Peer review of work is expected from all engineers, and we work in a test driven fashion as often it allows, but understand sometimes we might need to kick some code about for a bit before we’ve got the right implementation then refactor and pin in test. We are big on pair programming and encourage it wherever possible.

WORKING FOR JUSTPARK

To give you more of an idea of the kind of projects you’ll be working on, here are just some of the initiatives our backend and platform teams have delivered recently

• Refactored our pricing service to standardise on one algorithm
• Introduced pricing surges for large scale events
• Updated our automated pricing algorithm to earn more money for our space owners
• We migrated to MySQL 8 from MySQL 5.7 with no downtime
• We’ve implemented CI/CD and in the process of introducing canary releases/automated rollback
• Written our own pricing engine, that can handle any car parks pricing structure
• Implemented multiple multi-million pound sub-products to support our core service

Requirements

About You

We’re looking for someone who can bring their tried and tested experience to JustPark to help us shape our Engineering team. Even with all that experience, though, we don’t expect you to be an expert on our systems or code base from day one!

You thrive in a collaborative environment where feedback is welcome, and you’re open to refining your ideas while supporting others. We appreciate individuals who invest in their craft and prefer to grow within a team.

We value people who are smarter than us and can teach us something new. You’ll be able to stand up for something you believe is right, and challenge when you see something that could be better. And you’ll welcome the challenge from your team when they do the same, because we’re all working towards a common goal.

We’re here to deliver a solution that makes life better for our customers. To do that you’ll need to see beyond just your role and understand how our business fits together to see the impact we all have on one another. You’ll seek out people here at JustPark and in the wider engineering community who inspire you, educate you and show you new ways of working.

We care about quality, and we expect the same from every person in the team. We laugh at our mistakes, but we don’t make them more than once. When things go wrong, we focus on finding a solution, support each other to make it right again and learn from it to do better in the future.

This is the right role for you if you have:

• 4+ years of engineering experience
• Experience with PHP & Laravel (or similar frameworks like Symfony) , along with basic proven commercial experience in Go and containerisation
• Experience with relational databases, in-memory data stores, and time-series databases
• Familiarity with observability, telemetry, and high-volume system monitoring
• You're comfortable testing your code and are familiar with TDD best practices
• You want to share your knowledge, and have a track record of mentoring junior engineers
• A performance-focused mindset, particularly with reservation systems or other transactional platforms
• You want to build a career working on a market-leading product with a talented team of engineers
• You want to work on a product that has to scale to a large number of bookings per second 
• Experience in app globalisation or adapting products for international markets is a welcome addition
• You want to work on a product that has a 99.99% uptime and high traffic volume 
• You have a performance and platform mindset
• You have experience breaking down projects and stories into small, incremental, shippable releases
• Prior experience working in a startup or scaleup environment is a plus
• Knowledge of payment systems is a plus 

What to expect

In your first week:

• Onboarding with our People Team and the Engineering team and introduction to our culture and ways of working
• Setting up equipment and tools
• Meeting the team and understanding workflows
• Reviewing company policies, values, and technical documentation
• Completing basic training or shadowing to understand the codebase or system architecture
• Shipping your first pull request, which you’ll see in Production

In your first month:

• Contributing to small tasks or bugs to get familiar with the codebase and workflow
• Attending team meetings, sprint planning, and stand-ups
• Learning about key projects, stakeholders, and technical practices
• Developing and presenting a small feature or making a meaningful update to a project
• Starting to participate in code reviews or pair programming

By the end of your 3rd month:

• Delivering a significant feature or project component
• Gaining a deeper understanding of the system architecture and technical stack
• Actively contributing to planning, retrospectives, and technical discussions
• Building strong working relationships with the team and understanding your role in the organisation
• Demonstrating alignment with company values and key performance indicators

Benefits

We trust you to know what’s needed to get the job done. That's why we work on a hybrid basis (with 1/2 days in the office and Tuesdays & Thursdays being our 'anchor days'), and we’ll work with you to make sure you have the right kit and the right environment for you to succeed. Plus we know it's not all about work! Check out some of the great benefits to joining the JustPark team below:

Investment in YOU and your wellbeing:

• Private Medical Insurance in partnership with Vitality. You’ll gain access to their rewards platform with discounts to top retailers including Apple, Peloton and more!
• Life Assurance in partnership with YuLife
• Gym membership discounts and fitness rewards
• Employee Assistance Provider - offering you (and your family) free confidential support and advice (e.g. counselling, legal or financial advice) for when you need it most
• 24/7 virtual GP access
  

Simplifying journeys so YOU can breathe easier:

• Cycle to Work scheme - a highly tax efficient way to purchase your new bike!
• £50 per month parking credit
  

Recharge your batteries:

• FREE restaurant-quality lunch cooked by our very own chef and longest-standing employee (Julie!). Take time out to enjoy lunch with the wider team and check out her repertoire HERE .
• Taking time off work to relax and recharge is important, that's why we have a generous holiday policy in place of 25 days, plus bank holidays PLUS your line manager has the ability to grant an additional 5 days (prorated)!
  

We look out for your family:

• Childcare benefit in partnership with Koru Kids (up to £100 a month!)
• Enhanced Maternity and Paternity policies, plus a host of other family-friendly policies
  

Look after the pennies to grow the £££’s!:

• A salary exchange pension scheme, helping to look out for ‘the future you’
• A generous ‘refer a friend’ scheme of £1000 per successful recommendation. Great people tend to know great people, so why not refer them to join for the ride!
  

Success is best when it’s shared!

• We love sharing in the success, therefore the whole company goes away once a quarter to learn about our goals and have an afternoon of fun team building
• Each department gets a budget of £50 per head every 6 months - relax and enjoy some time out of work with your colleagues