Senior Software Engineer (backend)

Who We Are

WillowTree, a TELUS International Company, is an award-winning digital product consultancy driven by innovation and grounded in strategy and user-centric design. We create long-term partnerships with the world’s leading brands to build and design digital flagship products crucial to our clients’ business needs. We’re a global consultancy with a client list that includes the NBA, Capital One, Mastercard, Charles Schwab, PepsiCo, AB InBev, Marriott, Domino's, and many more. Ultimately we measure ourselves by the outcomes we achieve for our clients. 

In January 2023, WillowTree was acquired by TELUS International (Symbol: TIXT).  The combined company brings an unparalleled ability to deliver customer service solutions to our clients, including apps, websites, voice experiences, content moderation, AI annotation, and customer experience representatives.

Location and Flexibility 

Our Senior Backend Software Engineers are integral parts of our team at WillowTree. To help retain our deep culture of collaboration, this role will maintain an in-office presence in a hybrid capacity (Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays) out of our Charlottesville, VA office.  

The Opportunity 

WillowTree is hiring for empathetic, curious engineers to join our growing team. We work in a dynamic and fulfilling atmosphere, helping our clients’ ideas come to life by building robust mobile and web applications. Our backend technology stack varies by project, so we value flexibility and willingness to learn. Our goal is to build amazing solutions for our clients, and our backend implementations are a crucial part of how we deliver on that promise.

We understand our responsibility to create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive place within the tech industry, while pushing to make our industry more representative. Because of this responsibility, we need candidates who value diversity and inclusion through their work, team collaboration, or mentorship. So in your cover letter, we encourage you to reflect on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Responsibilities 

• Confidently deliver high-quality software by applying critical thinking to products, requirements, and processes
• Work closely with clients to influence technical product decisions and business goals
• You’ll stay up to date with the landscape of software engineering best practices, tools, and frameworks
• Have professional programming experience— we’re thinking at least 5 years
• Understanding of various software architectures and can adapt/compose solutions to unique problems with sustainable and reusable solutions
• Help mentor and coach a project team towards shared goals and outcomes
• Navigate difficult conversations by providing constructive feedback to teams and clients
• You’ll identify obstacles to ensure quality, improve our user experience and how we build software
• Self-aware of limitations, yet curious to learn new solutions while being receptive to constructive feedback from teammates
• You’ll guide your team to understand and work through changing priorities by bringing positive energy 
• Communicate and simplify complex problems in order to foster understanding across multidisciplinary teams 
• Apply your knowledge and findings at an organizational scale

Qualifications 

• Are driven by curiosity and enthusiastic about learning new technologies
• Are motivated by solving problems and finding creative solutions
• Believe in autonomy and taking initiative
• Have professional programming experience — we’re thinking 5+ years
• Inspire others to write code that is durable, secure, scalable, always up and running
• Have in-depth experience with one server-side programming language — such as Java, Kotlin or other JVM languages; C# or other .NET languages; Node.js; Python, Go, and perhaps a breadth in others
• Have in-depth experience working with relational and/or NoSQL databases. This could be PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MySQL, MongoDB, or another type of document-database. This includes experience with schema design, indexing, querying, and performance tuning
• Are eager to share your knowledge with teammates through mentorship, code reviews and pair programming sessions
• Have experience writing apps for Azure, AWS, GCP, CloudFoundry, Heroku, SalesForce, Mulesoft and/or other cloud providers
• Are well versed in using Cloud Provider utilities such as CLI tools and Consoles (Azure Portal, AWS Console)
• Have experience developing RESTful APIs and/or Graphql APIs
• Possess strong debugging and troubleshooting skills
• Are able to assist teammates with issues by breaking down complex tasks
• Effectively communicate system architecture and development decisions to clients and teammates
• Strong appreciation for CI/CD (e.g. CircleCI, TeamCity, AzureDevops) and experience setting up deployment pipelines

Bonus Points 

• Have experience with the concepts of “infrastructure as code" - such as CloudFormation; Terraform; Azure Resource Manager
• Familiarity with building highly available and scalable systems
  • Worker/Message queues
  • Pub/Sub
• Observability such as monitoring and logging
• Platform migration from on-premise solutions to cloud based solutions
• Are comfortable designing authentication and authorization flows for API services and making recommendations to clients
• Engagement in thought leadership (Blog articles, Git Gists, Stack Overflow answers)
• Familiarity with one CMS - Optimizely; dotCMS; AEM;

Why WillowTree?

We offer a place to be yourself.

We want you to reach your fullest potential and part of your professional development at WillowTree will include dedicated time to innovate on passion projects and an annual stipend to fund your professional pursuits.

WillowTree upholds our core values in every aspect of our work. We promote safe and inclusive work environments and maintain a drug-free workplace. We celebrate our differences and provide equal employment opportunities to all team members and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Diverse teams build better products. We acknowledge that the tech industry especially lacks opportunity for those who are of non-traditional backgrounds and in underrepresented groups. In order to create the best products for everyone, we know that it's important for our team to reflect the diversity of our users, and we are committed to being the change we want to see.