Backend Engineer

*This role supports US-based remote work, or Palo Alto, CA based hybrid in-office.

About Wealthfront Engineering Wealthfront’s culture centers around continuous learning, innovation, and quality-driven software development. With high quality software as our ultimate engineering objective, our key tactic is automation:

• Wealthfront software automates the financial services we provide to our clients, and within these services we automate the collection of data that we learn from on our way to making our services even better.

• Wealthfront engineers function as builder/operators, with dual responsibility for building the system and operating it in production. Any toil that this brings about is automated away by engineers. This investment in automation is expected, and the prioritization of it is always built into our planning and execution.

• Wealthfront engineers automate our development processes. For example, Wealthfront engineers automate all of our testing. Manual testing is not part of the software development lifecycle at Wealthfront.

• Wealthfront engineers automate observability in case of failure. If something is up, our systems inform engineers appropriately. If our systems are quiet, they are healthy.

If you are drawn to being an engineer within such an environment, and having outsized impact as an engineer at a magnitude that is only available within a company achieving greatness at our size (~250 employees, half in engineering), then we want to hear from you! 

About the Role

• We are looking for backend engineers to join our core product development teams. You’ll work with other engineers to design and build new features or enhance existing features. This work will add capabilities to the various backend systems and services that support Wealthfront’s products, and will be done with automated instrumentation and monitoring to require minimal operational maintenance.
• You’ll help improve the maintainability and stability of our codebase by fixing issues and adding necessary enhancements to our existing backend systems. You’ll ensure that mission critical backend systems and services operate smoothly in production by triaging and resolving operational issues as part of a team of on-call engineers. You’ll proactively identify opportunities for improving the reliability and scalability of our systems.
• Additionally, you might play a part in evolving the engineering organization by participating in recruiting activities such as interviewing and attending career fairs and providing mentorship to other engineers on the team.

About You

• You have 2-6 years of experience in developing backend components, services or APIs in Java or a similar language. You demonstrate knowledge and understanding of distributed systems and functional programming paradigms. You have knowledge of SQL and experience working with online data stores (ideally something like MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server but NoSQL is okay).
• You have passion for agile, test-driven development, continuous integration and automated testing. You also have a passion for working on platforms and backend systems that have measurable business impact and like working in a fast paced cross functional environment.
• While not required, experience working with Spark pipelines is a plus along with knowledge of an ORM technology such as Hibernate.  Another plus is working with a dependency injection framework (one of Guice, Spring, Pico, Dagger).
• You have either a BS or MS in computer science or related field.

Once you join, Wealthfront will:

• Pair you with a mentor who will guide you through our structured onboarding program
• Encourage you to work on projects that match your professional goals
• Support your professional development by providing feedback during weekly 1:1s and our semi-annual reviews
• Provide you autonomy so you can be a happy and successful member of our team