(Senior) Backend Engineer, Maps
- Your enthusiasm brings creative energy to brainstorming sessions on mapping features and edge cases.
- You enjoy exploring new technologies like Go, C++, and geospatial datasets, keeping your work exciting.
- You thrive in a dynamic scale-up environment where rapid growth means new challenges daily.
- The team’s collaborative nature and the opportunity to work with various stakeholders appeal to your social side.
- Your love for variety may conflict with the focused, iterative work of optimising low-latency ETA predictions.
About Wheely
Wheely is redefining premium transportation across major cities in Europe, the US, and the Middle East. We blend cutting-edge technology with the craft of five-star chauffeuring to deliver an experience trusted by more than 100,000 active riders and 1,200 corporate accounts.
We’re a profitable, fast-growing scale-up with $43M raised and over $100M in annual revenue. Having recently launched in New York City, we’re expanding rapidly across the US and EMEA. If you take pride in your craft and want to help shape the next chapter of our growth, we'd love to hear from you.
About The Role
Our Mapping team tackles the spatial intelligence of the platform: road matching, low-latency ETA predictions, and processing thousands of coordinates every second to ensure every journey is accurately tracked.
We’re looking for a Mid/Senior Backend Engineer to join a team that keeps frameworks lean and focuses on what matters: clean, maintainable code, shipped fast with TDD, DDD, and continuous integration and delivery.
We are a Go shop, and while we’re busy migrating away from our Ruby monolith, our stack includes PostgreSQL, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Redis, gRPC, and Thrift. Everything runs on AWS and Kubernetes, managed via Terraform.
Our interview process includes a recruiter screen, algorithms and live coding. Senior+ candidates also complete a system design section and a structured review of past experience and achievements.
Responsibilities
- Write high-quality, performant code primarily in Go.
- Implement new microservices while helping us responsibly manage and migrate away from legacy services.
- Work closely with product managers, designers, and data scientists to turn abstract requirements into concrete technical designs.
- Ensure our systems stay responsive under heavy load, optimising for both latency and reliability.
Requirements
- 3+ years of experience (5+ years for seniors) building and maintaining scalable backend services.
- We use Go. If you know it, great. If not, we’ll interview you in your strongest language (Python, C++, Java, Ruby, etc.). We hire for engineering fundamentals, not syntax.
- In-depth knowledge of relational and NoSQL databases (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis) and experience with message brokers like RabbitMQ or Kafka.
- At least 1 year of hands-on experience with mapping-related work such as processing noisy geospatial data, map-matching techniques, or road network graphs and routing algorithms.
Nice To Have
- Driver-side intuition for navigation systems (rerouting behavior, GPS drift, missed turns, real-world edge cases).
- Experience with routing engines like OSRM.
- Proficiency in C++.
- Familiarity with open geospatial datasets such as OpenStreetMap.
What We Offer
- Office-based role in West London, four days a week with flexible start and finish times, plus one remote day of your choice
- Salary: £90,000 – £120,000
- Employee stock options plan
- Private medical and dental insurance
- Life and critical illness cover
- Latest-generation MacBook Pro and 4k display
- Monthly credit towards Wheely journeys
- Cycle to Work scheme
- Professional development stipend
- Relocation support, including visa sponsorship and allowance
All of your personal information will be collected stored and processed in accordance with Wheely’s Candidate Privacy Notice
Best personality fits for this role
You excel in wrestling with abstract geospatial problems like map-matching and routing algorithms.
Read the INTP career guide →Your strategic thinking helps design scalable microservices and migrate legacy systems efficiently.
Read the INTJ career guide →Your hands-on, practical approach to building and debugging makes you highly effective with geospatial data?
Read the ISTP career guide →