Senior Backend Engineer, Wattpad
Backend Services
Platform for sharing original writing
Job no longer available
Platform for sharing original writing
101-200 employees
Job no longer available
101-200 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 have experience working on distributed systems
- You develop scalable, robust, and maintainable code and have a desire to contribute to the broader software engineering community
- You’re comfortable debugging systems at different layers of the stack
- 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 documentation)
- You have or are currently mentoring other developer
Desirable
- Proficiency with Go and/or PHP, and knowledge of Kubernetes and Docker
- Passionate about security and privacy
What the job involves
- Contributing directly to our writer revenue and engagement objectives by building new features and experiments to scale out in 2023 and beyond
- Designing, building, and maintaining a large scale distributed system serving millions of users per day
- Collaborating with Product Designers and Product Managers to deliver an amazing UX
- Executing A/B tests and experiments to validate paid product ideas and designs
- Maintaining high quality systems by writing unit and service tests for all your code
- Iteratively achieving excellence by deploying to production multiple times per day
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
3% employee growth in 12 months
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 HQ
St. Lawrence, Toronto, ON
Leadership
Allen lau
(Co-Founder)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
(Co-Founder)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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