Staff Backend Engineer

About Wealthfront Engineering

Wealthfront’s culture centers around continuous learning, innovation, and quality-driven software development. With high quality software as our ultimate engineering objective, our key tactic is automation:

• Wealthfront software automates the financial services we provide to our clients, and within these services we automate the collection of data that we learn from on our way to making our services even better.

• Wealthfront engineers function as builder/operators, with dual responsibility for building the system and operating it in production. Any toil that this brings about is automated away by engineers. This investment in automation is expected, and the prioritization of it is always built into our planning and execution.

• Wealthfront engineers automate our development processes. For example, Wealthfront engineers automate all of our testing. Manual testing is not part of the software development lifecycle at Wealthfront.

• Wealthfront engineers automate observability in case of failure. If something is up, our systems inform engineers appropriately. If our systems are quiet, they are healthy.

If you are drawn to being an engineer within such an environment, and having outsized impact as an engineer at a magnitude that is only available within a company achieving greatness at our size (~350 employees, half in engineering), then we want to hear from you! 

• Work with a team of engineers to design and build new features or enhancements to existing features. This work will add capabilities to the various backend systems and services that support Wealthfront’s products, and will be done with automated instrumentation and monitoring to require minimal operational maintenance.
• Help improve the maintainability and stability of our codebase by working on fixing issues and adding necessary enhancements to our existing backend systems.
• Ensure that mission critical backend systems and services operate smoothly in production by triaging and resolving operational issues as part of a team of on-call engineers.
• Proactively identify opportunities for improving the reliability and scalability of our systems.
• Participate in recruiting activities such as interviewing and attending career fairs.
• Provide mentorship to other engineers on the team.

• 6+  years of experience in developing backend components, services or APIs in Java or a similar language.
• Demonstrated knowledge and understanding of distributed systems and functional programming paradigms.
• Knowledge of SQL and experience working with online data stores (one of MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server).
• You have passion for agile, test-driven development, continuous integration and automated testing. You also have a passion for working on platforms and backend systems that have measurable business impact and like working in a fast paced cross functional environment.
• While not required, experience working with Spark pipelines is a plus along with knowledge of an ORM technology such as Hibernate.  Another plus is working with a dependency injection framework (one of Guice, Spring, Pico, Dagger).

• You have either a BS or MS in computer science or related field.

• Pair you with a mentor who will guide you through our structured onboarding program
• Encourage you to work on projects that match your professional goals
• Support your professional development by providing feedback during weekly 1:1s and our semi-annual reviews
• Provide you autonomy so you can be a happy and successful member of our team

Estimated annual salary range: $208,000 - $228,000 USD plus equity and a discretionary bonus.

Benefits include medical, vision, dental, 401K plan, generous time off, parental leave, wellness reimbursements, professional development, employee investing discount, and more!