Senior Platform Engineer, Wattpad

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong focus on distributed backend systems
• Experience planning and leading medium to large technical initiatives involving multiple members from your team
• Deep experience with Golang and/or Python, including building and operating high traffic production services
• Proven success in designing and operating real-time data systems using tools like Kafka, Flink, or Kinesis
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure (especially AWS) and how to build scalable, observable systems
• Strong Interest or familiarity working with large-scale data platforms and technologies like EMR, Glue, Airflow, Dataproc, Redshift, Spark, or DMS
• Experience working on backend systems that operate 24/7 and require high reliability
• Strong Interest or familiarity working with information retrieval systems such as Elasticsearch, time-series databases, or vector databases
• Passion for writing clean, maintainable code and for improving systems over time
• You have or are currently mentoring other developers
• Deep knowledge of Docker and container orchestration tools like Kubernetes or ECS

Desirable

• 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 Data 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
• As a Senior Data Platform Engineer, you’ll play a key role in evolving our real-time data infrastructure to meet the scale and complexity of our rapidly growing business. You’ll take technical ownership of major components, lead design and architecture decisions, mentor team members, and drive long-term improvements in our systems' performance, reliability, and scalability
• Leading the design, implementation, and scaling of real-time distributed systems that serve millions of users per day
• Building and evolving high-performance microservices in Golang and Python running on AWS
• Scaling and hardening our Kafka-based event platform, currently processing over 200K messages per second
• Driving technical excellence across the team by identifying performance bottlenecks, improving system observability, and reducing operational overhead
• Taking ownership of infrastructure, ensuring high availability and resilience across our platform
• Writing robust unit, integration, and service-level tests, and reviewing others’ code with a mentorship mindset
• Driving adoption of new technologies and architectural patterns to future-proof our systems
• Partnering with cross-functional stakeholders (Data Science, Analytics, Security, Product, etc.) to deliver platform capabilities that enable innovation
• Mentoring and guiding engineers through technical challenges and design decisions

• 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