[Wattpad] Senior Engineer

Wattpad’s vision is to entertain and connect the world through webnovel 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. Representing a tapestry of cultures and languages, people around the world come to Wattpad every month to share and discover stories they can’t find anywhere else. Come build the future of entertainment and storytelling with our global team, and write your next chapter with us!

Wattpad is part of the WEBTOON family of brands, the largest storytelling platform in the world that enables creators and users to discover, create, and share stories. With over 24 million creators and ~170 million active users per month, we are truly empowering creation by anyone, for everyone. To read more about our family of Brands, check out our website here. 

You will be joining the Core Platforms team. You'll get the opportunity to create and work on the backend platform and systems that power Wattpad. The purpose of the team is to establish a robust set of centralized tools that backend developers can use to implement secure, performant, consistent code quickly to increase the productivity and happiness of Wattpad engineers. You will be creating new tools, defining architectural best practices and creating frameworks for engineers to follow. Our technology creates capabilities to understand stories and users and accelerates our ability to innovate at Wattpad.

Wattpad runs on a large distributed system that handles 45k requests every second. You’ll be assisting in modernizing our backend platform and systems which currently include our monolith, microservices and backend infrastructure. Our monolith is written in PHP and backed by S3, Redis, Memcache, MySQL and Cloudflare. Our microservices are written in Go and are backed by S3, DynamoDB and MySQL. At this scale, caching is paramount so we have multiple terabytes of data across memcached, redis and groupcache. 

• Designing, building, and maintaining functionality on a large-scale distributed system serving millions of people per day.
• Writing new features, tools and services in Go and PHP.
• Improving reliability and performance of core components and existing systems.
• Writing unit and service tests for all your code.
• 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 tools across the engineering org.

• 5-7+ years of experience in a prior software development role
• You have experience with monitoring distributed systems at scale 
• You develop scalable, robust, and maintainable code and fault-tolerant services/systems
• You are skilled in Go and PHP
• You’ve worked with cloud platforms as a service (AWS, GCP, etc.) for at least 3 years 
• You know how to use Docker
• You’ve used container orchestration tools like Kubernetes or ECS
• You have experience in comprehending complex, custom-built codebases, and a history of thorough feature testing and migration
• You’re comfortable debugging systems at different layers of the stack
• You are comfortable in both static and dynamic languages and don’t mind switching between them
• You enjoy working with a team but have no problem working independently
• Nothing makes you happier than a hard problem solved well (and has “just the right” amount of documentation)
• You have or are currently mentoring other developers
• You have provided technical leadership on initiative(s) involving 2+ other engineers

• You have exposure to Infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform & Ansible
• Hands-on experience with CI systems such as TravisCI
• Passionate about security and privacy

• Career development; we believe in mentorship and investing in your learning, supporting you to achieve your goals
• Top industry health benefits, including vision and dental 
• Your own health/wellness account to spend each year
• RRSP Contributions (Canada), 401K Contributions (USA)
• Generous vacation and Maternity/Parental leave top-up program
• Corporate discount for gym memberships for you and your family
• Work from almost anywhere in the world for part of the year
• 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 Meet 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.

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