Senior Software Engineer I - Backend
Careem is building the Everything App for the greater Middle East - making it easy to move around, order food and groceries, manage payments, and more. Our purpose is simple: to simplify and improve people’s lives and build an awesome organisation that inspires.
Since 2012, Careem has enabled earnings for over 2.5 million Captains, simplified the lives of more than 70 million customers, and built a platform where the region’s best talent and entrepreneurs thrive. We operate in 70+ cities across 10 countries, from Morocco to Pakistan.
We’re now entering our next chapter - one powered by AI. We’re looking for AI talent: curious problem-solvers who know how to apply AI to build tools, automate workflows, and create real impact. Whether it’s streamlining operations, enhancing customer experience, or reimagining internal systems - we want people who can make Careem work smarter and move faster.
About the Role
Careem's Marketplace ETA & Routing team sits at the heart of how millions of customers experience our platform. We power the estimated delivery times and routing logic across every Careem vertical - Food, Groceries, Abu Dhabi Taxi, and Hala - from the moment a customer browses a menu to the second their order arrives at the door.
As a Senior Software Engineer I on this team, you will build and maintain the highly reliable backend systems that make real-time ETAs and delivery routing possible at scale. You'll work alongside a tight-knit, backend-focused team of engineers across Jordan, Pakistan, and Dubai, and take ownership of critical infrastructure that directly shapes the customer experience across all of Careem's delivery products.
What You'll Do
- Design, build, and maintain highly scalable and robust backend services powering real-time ETA computation and delivery routing across all Careem verticals.
- Write high-quality, performant, and reliable Golang code while delivering complete features and resolving bugs independently.
- Understand functional specifications end-to-end and translate them into production-grade backend solutions.
- Ensure system reliability through rigorous testing practices - unit, integration, and end-to-end - with a reliability-first engineering mindset.
- Participate in the on-call rotation and respond to incidents within defined SLAs, helping to maintain platform uptime and stability.
- Contribute to team agile and engineering practices, and play an active role in their continuous improvement.
- Collaborate closely with teammates across multiple time zones, contributing to a culture of technical excellence and strong team cohesion.
What You'll Need
- 4+ years of professional software development experience.
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.
- Hands-on experience with Golang or at least one modern object-oriented programming language (Java, C#, C++, Kotlin); Golang is the primary language of our stack.
- Strong Computer Science fundamentals: object-oriented design, data structures, and algorithms.
- Proven experience operating and deploying changes to live production systems reliably.
- A collaborative, team-first mindset with strong communication skills.
Nice to Have
- Experience with routing systems, ETA computation, or geospatial/logistics domains.
- Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Azure.
- Experience with container technologies including Docker and Kubernetes.
- Working knowledge of relational and non-relational database systems.
- Experience applying software engineering best practices: coding standards, code reviews, source control, build processes, and testing.
Master's Degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.
What we’ll provide you
We offer colleagues the opportunity to drive impact in the region while they learn and grow. As a full time Careem colleague, you will be able to:
- Work and learn from great minds by joining a community of inspiring colleagues.
- Put your passion to work in a purposeful organisation dedicated to creating impact in a region with a lot of untapped potential.
- Explore new opportunities to learn and grow every day.
- Work remotely from any country in the world for 30 days a year with unlimited vacation days per year.
- Access to healthcare benefits and fitness reimbursements for health activities including gym, health club, and training classes.