[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!