[Wattpad] Backend Engineer

Wattpad is a global multiplatform entertainment company whose vision is to entertain and connect the world through stories. Since 2006, we’ve been on a mission to use the power of community and technology to unleash the full potential of stories to the world. Every month 85 million people around the world spend over 23 billion minutes on Wattpad to share and discover stories they can’t find anywhere else. Our brand banner includes: Wattpad, Wattpad WEBTOON Studios, Wattpad Books and Wattpad Brand Partnerships. We’re proudly based in Toronto, but our reach is global. Come build the future of entertainment and storytelling, and write your next chapter with us!

You will be joining the Backend Services team. You'll get the opportunity to create and work on the backend platforms that power Wattpad. If you have a passion for high-impact engineering, this is the place to be! You will be asked to create a robust set of centralized systems that engineers can use to implement secure, performant, consistent code quickly to increase the productivity and happiness of Wattpad engineers. These systems will need reliable, resilient, secure, easy to operate, and cost-efficient. You will also help drive initiatives to extend how our platform will work for the future; enabling our 30M+ users to create and enjoy new stories.

Wattpad runs on a large distributed system that handles 45k requests every second. Our microservices are written in Go and are backed by S3, DynamoDB and MySQL, while our monolith is written in PHP and backed by S3, Redis, Memcache, MySQL and Cloudflare. At this scale, caching is paramount so we have multiple terabytes of data across memcached, redis and groupcache. 

What you'll be doing:

• Designing, building, and maintaining functionality on a large-scale distributed system serving millions of people per day
• Building new features, tools and services in PHP and Go.
• Improving reliability and performance of core components and existing systems.
• Writing tests for all your work.
• Defining best practices and providing mentorship and support to other engineers.
• Researching and implementing new technology to solve tomorrow’s scaling issues.
• Advocating for the adoption of best practices, systems and tools across the engineering org.

What we're looking for:

• 3+ years of experience in a prior SaaS engineering role
• You’ve worked with cloud platforms as a service (AWS, GCP, etc.) for at least 3 years 
• You are skilled in Go or PHP 
• You know how to use Docker
• You’re an excellent communicator
• You love learning and applying your knowledge in novel ways
• You enjoy working with a team but have no problem working independently
• You write clean, readable code that communicates its intents and methods clearly to future engineers (but you can also deal with code that isn’t and doesn’t)
• Nothing makes you happier than a hard problem solved well (and has “just the right” amount of documentation)

Bonus points for:

• You have worked with AWS 
• You have experience with monitoring distributed systems at scale
• You have exposure to Infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform & Ansible
• You have a deep knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes or ECS
• You have worked with REST APIs and/or gRPC
• You have worked with Kafka 
• You have worked with CI systems such as TravisCI
• You have or are currently mentoring other engineers

What we offer:

• Career development; we believe in mentorship and investing in your learning, supporting you to achieve your goals
• Health benefits, including vision and dental!
• RRSP Contributions (Canada), 401K Contributions (USA)
• Generous vacation and Parental Leave Top-up
• Corporate discount for gym memberships for you and your family
• Winter break shutdown and a whole lot more!

Wattpad is conducting all interviews in a distributed manner using applicable third party software where needed and using visual interface tools such as Google Hangouts and Zoom.

About Wattpad

Who are we? Entrepreneurs and Do-ers. Our vision is to entertain and connect the world through stories, and our mission is to use the power of community and technology to unleash the full potential of stories to the world.

What does that mean? We are visionaries, community builders, passionate problem solvers, storytellers, coffee snobs (tea drinkers, too!), curious by nature, and culturally diverse.

What are we obsessed with? Our users. Solving complex problems and maximizing flow. Learning constantly. Building the next great storytelling product. Finding the greatest stories ever told. Dogs (and cats), coffee, and good snacks.

How do we work? Autonomously, collaboratively, respectfully. Balancing with work, family, and play...and all while having a great time.

Wattpad is a remote friendly company and encourages remote candidates to apply as long as they are located and authorized to work in either the US or Canada (excluding Quebec) as a precondition of employment. We are not able to sponsor applicants for work permits.

If you happen to live near the areas of either Toronto, Ontario or Halifax, Nova Scotia, you may also have the opportunity to work from our beautiful offices - 1 located in Downtown Toronto and the other in Halifax.

Culture and Diversity

Wattpad is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate. Period. 

Wattpad welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process. We have taken a leadership position on creating a culture and an organization that truly values diversity. We are committed to fostering a global team that reflects the diversity of the Wattpad community. At Wattpad, we believe cultural fit doesn’t mean culturally identical, and diversity of thought helps us to challenge one another to think big and think differently. We consider employment applicants without regard to age, race, colour, national origin, citizenship, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, veteran status, marital status, disability status or any other protected status.

If you have any special needs or accessibility requirements, please let us know. We will do our utmost to accommodate, in accordance with applicable local legislation.

Don’t meet all the requirements? Studies show women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs if they do not meet all the qualifications. Therefore, in an effort to build a more diverse workplace, we encourage you to apply anyways. You might actually be the right person or you may be a good fit for a number of other openings we currently have.