Senior Platform Engineer, Wattpad
Data
CA$120-160k
Salary is only applicable for candidates based in Canada, varies on location
More information about location
Platform for sharing original writing
Be an early applicant
Platform for sharing original writing
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
CA$120-160k
Salary is only applicable for candidates based in Canada, varies on location
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
Wattpad's mission is to create a world where everyone's story can be heard, and anyone can belong.
Role
Who you are
- You love learning and have a growth mindset
- 8+ years of experience in a prior software development role
- You are highly experienced in Golang and/or Python
- You enjoy both building and maintaining complex back-end systems that operate 24/7 at high scale
- Interest or experience in information retrieval systems (e.g., Elasticsearch, time-series databases, vector databases)
- Strong Interest or familiarity with some big data technologies such as, but not limited to, Airflow, EMR, Dataproc, AWS DMS, AWS Glue, Spark, Redshift, Flink, Kafka
- 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 have some understanding of database fundamentals and experience working on data platforms
- We value candidates with interests in DevOps or infrastructure and related technologies (e.g. Kubernetes)
- We value experience planning and leading technical initiatives or projects of various scopes and sizes
- You have or are currently mentoring other developers
Desirable
- Exposure and some working experience with data warehouses like Redshift
- You have a deep knowledge of Docker and exposure to container orchestration tools like Kubernetes or ECS
- Experience with Kafka
- Experience with Apache Spark data processing framework
- You have exposure to Infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform
What the job involves
- Our Data Engineering team is responsible for building, maintaining, and enhancing the entire data infrastructure, including realtime and batch data ingestion, transformation, and serving, to support a wide range of business functions
- As a Senior Platform Engineer, you will be at the forefront of designing and developing scalable, high-performance data platforms that power critical data-driven applications
- You will work closely with engineering, data scientists, analysts, and security teams to ensure the infrastructure is reliable, performant, and capable of evolving with the needs of the business
- Designing, building, maintaining, and monitoring a large scale distributed system serving millions of people per day
- Building new and updating existing microservices on AWS in Go and Python
- Maintain and scale our event platform powered by Kafka (ingesting 200K msgs/sec)
- 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 new technology to solve tomorrow’s scaling issues
Application process
- 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
Our take
Content is king and Wattpad has managed to create a platform that aggregates the most loved original writing content in the world, turning the traditional publishing industry on its head.
Where authors used to submit drafts to dozens of publishing houses in the hope of getting some eyeballs on their work, Wattpad opened up the process to millions of young authors by letting them easily submit their work, and fostering a community around their software that offers feedback and help.
The e-reading platform is now looking to double down on its strategy of taking its user-generated fiction and turning it into successful intellectual property upon which original series and movies can be based. However a significant challenge for Wattpad is in producing original, marketable content from its platform given the popularity of fanfiction, stories which are based on existing intellectual property.
Another challenge for Wattpad is the current economic conditions which have affected much of the tech sector and are not sparing digital publishing. Having shelved bold plans for the future it also laid off 15% of its workforce in March 2023. Having realigned for its current business needs however, it is now well placed to weather the current market downturn.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Jan 2018
$51m
LATE VC
Apr 2014
$46m
SERIES C
Total funding: $117.8m
Company benefits
- Full health benefits
- Career development & Mentorship opportunities
- RRSP matching
- Generous parental Leave top-up
- Flexible hours
- Regular hackathons
- Healthy snacks & drinks
- Your choice of hardware
- Monthly work-from-home allowance
- Beautiful offices in Toronto and Halifax
- Easy access to transit
Company values
- UserObsessed- We make every decision by stepping into our users’ shoes
- Inclusive - We help everyone belong
- Trailblazer - We push ourselves on how we think and how we act
- BuildItForward - We’re always building a foundation for tomorrow
- PlayToWin - We’re driven to lead the pack
- Resourceful -We make the most of every minute and every dollar
- TeamWork - We do what’s best for the greater good
Company HQ
St. Lawrence, Toronto, ON
Articles
Leadership
Allen lau
(CEO)Lau attended University of Toronto where he earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering followed by a master's in the same subject. Thereafter he briefly worked as a software engineer for Brightspark before founding his first notable company, Tira Wireless, a mobile development startup. He is also the co-founder of Two Small Fish Ventures, a fund that invests in Toronto and Waterloo-based early-stage internet companies with strong network effects.
Ivan Yuen
(CSO)Prior to Wattpad, Ivan co-founded FeedM8 and served as the company’s CTO. Before that he was one of the first employees of Tira Wireless, where he helped grow the technical team and developed new and emerging wireless technologies. Ivan graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in Computer Engineering and also earned an MBA from the Rotman School of Management.
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