About this role
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 Quick and Shops team owns the customer-facing backend experience for two of our fastest-growing verticals. We power everything a customer sees and interacts with inside the consumer app — from browsing to checkout — through a server-driven UI architecture that keeps our mobile and backend teams tightly aligned.
As a Senior Software Engineer I, you will take full ownership of backend domains, build reliable and scalable services, and collaborate closely with mobile engineers to deliver a seamless customer experience for millions of Careem users.
What You'll Do
• Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services powering the Quick and Shops customer experience.
• Write high-quality Golang code, delivering complete features and resolving bugs independently.
• Build and maintain REST APIs, service-to-service integrations, and gateway and configuration-driven systems.
• Own and evolve backend data models and catalog systems supporting our product verticals.
• Manage event-driven systems using Kafka and Avro schema evolution.
• Support AWS cloud infrastructure including S3, CloudFront, DNS, and certificate management.
• Participate in on-call rotations and debug production issues across highly distributed and decoupled systems.
• Mentor junior colleagues and drive cross-functional technical discussions across teams.
• Champion AI-assisted development tools as part of your daily engineering workflow.
What You'll Need
• Proven backend engineering experience at a mid-band level or above — this is not an entry-level role.
• Strong hands-on experience with Golang; candidates with deep experience in another modern language (Java, Kotlin, C#, C++) will be considered if they can demonstrate a clear ability to ramp up.
• Product-facing backend experience — you have built systems that directly serve end customers, not purely infrastructure or platform-isolated work.
• Experience with REST APIs, service-to-service integrations, and distributed systems.
• Familiarity with data modeling, Kafka, and Avro schema evolution.
• AW