Senior Backend Engineer, Maps

Senior Backend Engineer, Maps Overview

Wheely is hiring a backend engineer to join its Maps team, which focuses on the spatial intelligence that powers the platform. The team works on problems such as road matching, low-latency ETA prediction, and processing thousands of coordinates every second so that each trip is tracked accurately and reliably.

The company describes itself as a premium transportation business operating across major cities in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. It combines advanced technology with high-end chauffeuring to create a service used by more than 100,000 active riders and 1,200 corporate accounts. Wheely says it is profitable, growing quickly, has raised $43 million, and generates more than $100 million in annual revenue. It has recently launched in New York City and is continuing to expand across the US and EMEA.

The engineering culture is intentionally lean and focused on shipping well-crafted software quickly. The team emphasizes clean, maintainable code and works with test-driven development, domain-driven design, and continuous integration and delivery. The stack is centered on Go, and the company is in the middle of moving away from a Ruby monolith. The broader technical environment includes PostgreSQL, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Redis, gRPC, and Thrift, with services running on AWS and Kubernetes and infrastructure managed through Terraform.

What you will do

• Build high-quality backend functionality in Go, with a strong focus on performance and reliability.
• Design and deliver new microservices while helping the team migrate carefully away from older legacy services.
• Work side by side with product managers, designers, and data scientists to turn high-level ideas into concrete technical designs and implementations.
• Keep systems responsive even under heavy load, making sure the platform remains fast and dependable.
• Contribute to the mapping and location-intelligence side of the product, including road matching, ETA prediction, and large-scale coordinate processing.

What the team is looking for

• Several years of experience building and maintaining scalable backend services, with 3+ years expected for the role and 5+ years for senior candidates.
• Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to demonstrate them in an interview, even if Go is not your strongest language.
• Experience with backend development in languages such as Go, Python, C++, Java, Ruby, or similar, since the interview can be conducted in your strongest language if needed.
• Solid knowledge of both relational and NoSQL databases, especially PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis.
• Hands-on experience with message brokers or event-driven infrastructure such as RabbitMQ or Kafka.
• At least one year of practical work on mapping or geospatial systems, including noisy GPS or location data, map matching, road-network graphs, or routing algorithms.
• Comfort working in a team that values maintainable code, automated testing, and continuous delivery.

Helpful extras

• Intuition for how navigation systems behave from the driver side, including rerouting, GPS drift, missed turns, and other real-world edge cases.
• Experience with routing engines such as OSRM.
• Strong C++ skills.
• Familiarity with open geospatial data sources such as OpenStreetMap.

Interview process

• Initial recruiter screening.
• Algorithms and live-coding interviews.
• For senior-level candidates, an additional system design interview.
• For senior-level candidates, a structured discussion of previous experience and achievements.

Working arrangement and package

This is an office-based position in West London, specifically in Hammersmith. The role requires at least four days per week onsite, and the company also offers one remote day of your choice. Flexible start and finish times are available.

The compensation package includes a salary between £90,000 and £120,000, employee stock options, private medical and dental insurance, life and critical illness cover, a latest-generation MacBook Pro, a 4K display, monthly ride credit for Wheely journeys, a Cycle to Work benefit, and a professional development stipend.

Relocation support is available and includes visa sponsorship as well as an allowance.

Applicants are asked to provide their salary expectations, confirm whether they are comfortable with the onsite requirement, and indicate whether they would need visa sponsorship now or in the future.

Degree Requirement: Not Specified

Visa Sponsorship Promising