- Company Name
- Wealthfront
- Job Title
- Backend Engineer
- Job Description
-
**Job title**
Backend Engineer
**Role summary**
Develop, automate, and maintain backend services that power Wealthfront’s investment and financial products. Drive reliability and scalability through automated instrumentation, testing, and observability, while supporting on‑call operations and mentoring emerging engineers.
**Expectations**
- 2–6 years of professional backend development.
- Proficiency in Java (or comparable language) and understanding of functional programming paradigms.
- Solid experience with distributed systems, SQL relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server) or NoSQL alternatives.
- Strong commitment to agile, test‑driven development, continuous integration, and automated testing.
- Comfortable with operation tasks: triage, incident response, and on‑call duties.
- Ability to work collaboratively in a fast‑paced, cross‑functional environment.
**Key responsibilities**
- Design, implement, and refactor backend components, services, and APIs to add new features or enhance existing functionality.
- Automate instrumentation, monitoring, and testing to reduce operational toil and ensure production stability.
- Resolve bugs, performance issues, and infrastructure incidents as part of a rotating on‑call team.
- Proactively identify and implement reliability, scalability, and maintainability improvements.
- Participate in recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding new engineers.
- Mentor junior team members and contribute to knowledge sharing initiatives.
- Collaborate with product, data, and platform teams to translate business requirements into robust backend solutions.
**Required skills**
- Java (or equivalent) development with object‑oriented and functional design skills.
- Distributed systems architecture and performance tuning.
- SQL proficiency; experience with relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server) or NoSQL data stores.
- Agile/ Scrum expertise; Test‑Driven Development (TDD) and static code analysis.
- Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines; automated unit, integration, and system testing.
- Automation of observability (metrics, logs, alerts) and incident response practices.
- Familiarity with dependency injection frameworks (Spring, Guice, Pico, Dagger) and ORMs (e.g., Hibernate).
- Optional: Spark pipeline development experience; cloud platform knowledge (AWS, GCP, Azure).
**Required education & certifications**
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field. No specific certifications required; cloud or data engineering certifications are a plus.