Platform Engineer, Wattpad
More information about location
Platform for sharing original writing
Job no longer available
Platform for sharing original writing
101-200 employees
Job no longer available
More information about location
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
- 3+ years of experience in a prior software development role
- You develop scalable, robust, and maintainable code
- You are skilled in Go and PHP
- You’ve worked with cloud platforms as a service (AWS, GCP, etc.) for at least 1 year
- You know how to use Docker
- You’ve used container orchestration tools like Kubernetes or ECS
- You’re an excellent communicator
- You have experience in comprehending complex, custom-built codebases, and a history of thorough feature testing and migration
- 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)
- 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
Desirable
- You have experience with monitoring distributed systems at scale
- You have exposure to Infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform & Ansible
- You have or are currently mentoring other developers
What the job involves
- 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
- You’ll be assisting in modernizing our backend platform and systems which currently include our monolith, microservices and backend infrastructure
- 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
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 Hangouts 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
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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