[Wattpad] Senior Backend Engineer (Payment and Ads Platforms)

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!

On the Payment and Ads Platforms team, you’ll build and maintain scalable, extensible, secure and observable payment services that power our paywalls, subscription offerings and virtual coin system. In the Ads domain, you’ll be working to consolidate ads logic as a backend platform that provides a single source of truth to our AN, iOS and web clients. The code you work on will have a direct impact on Wattpad’s users and bottom line. As part of the team, you’ll share ownership of our success and the direction of payment services that support our 35M+ monthly engaged users.

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.

Your engineering career and happiness are incredibly important to us, so we are always finding new ways to level up your skills. We believe in a team culture that enables empowered engineers to fix problems in the way that they see fit.

What you’ll be doing:

• Designing, building, and maintaining functionality on a large scale distributed system serving millions of people per day
• Building new product features in Go and PHP
• Improving reliability and performance of core components and existing systems
• Configuring and maintaining the infrastructure that runs those systems
• Writing unit and service tests for all your code
• Researching and implementing new technology to solve tomorrow’s scaling issues

What we're looking for:

• 5+ years of experience in a prior software development role
• You are skilled in Go
• You know PHP
• You have experience with AWS (or another major cloud provider like Azure or GCP)
• You have experience with 3rd party integrations
• You enjoy building and maintaining complex back-end systems that operate 24/7 at high scale
• 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)
• You are comfortable in both static and dynamic languages and don’t mind switching between them
• You love learning and applying your knowledge in novel ways
• Nothing makes you happier than a hard problem solved well (with “just enough” documentation)

Bonus points:

• You have integration experience with 3rd party payment systems like Stripe, Square or equivalent services
• You’ve worked with Ads Platform tools or APIs like Kevel or Google Adsense for Platform (AFP)
• You have experience with Docker
• You’ve used container orchestration tools like Kubernetes or ECS
• You have exposure to Infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform & Ansible

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.