[Wattpad] Senior Platform Engineer, Data

Wattpad’s vision is to entertain and connect the world through webnovel stories. Since 2006, we’ve been on a mission to use the power of community and technology to unleash the full potential of stories to the world. Representing a tapestry of cultures and languages, around the world come to Wattpad every month to share and discover stories they can’t find anywhere else. Come build the future of entertainment and storytelling with our global team, and write your next chapter with us!

Wattpad is part of the WEBTOON family of brands, the largest storytelling platform in the world that enables creators and users to discover, create, and share stories. With over 24 million creators and ~170 million active users per month, we are truly empowering creation by anyone, for everyone. To read more about our family of Brands, check out our website here. 

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 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.

Candidates can be remote in Canada but must be working to coincide with core EST hours (i.e. 9am to 5pm EST).

What you'll be doing:

• Designing, building, maintaining, and monitoring a large scale distributed system serving millions of people per day 
• Building new and updating existing microservices on AWS in Go and Python
• Maintain and scale our event platform powered by Kafka (ingesting 200K msgs/sec)
• Improving reliability and performance of core components and existing systems 
• Configuring and maintaining the infrastructure that runs those systems
• Writing unit and service tests for all your code 
• Researching new technology to solve tomorrow’s scaling issues 

What we're looking for:

• You love learning and have a growth mindset
• 8+ years of experience in a prior software development role
• You are highly experienced in Golang and/or Python
• You enjoy both building and maintaining complex back-end systems that operate 24/7 at high scale
• Interest or experience in information retrieval systems (e.g., Elasticsearch, time-series databases, vector databases)
• Strong Interest or familiarity with some big data technologies such as, but not limited to, Airflow, EMR, Dataproc, AWS DMS, AWS Glue, Spark, Redshift, Flink, Kafka
• You write clean, readable code that communicates its intents and methods clearly to future engineers (but you can also deal with code that isn’t and doesn’t)
• You have some understanding of database fundamentals and experience working on data platforms
• We value candidates with interests in DevOps or infrastructure and related technologies (e.g. Kubernetes) 
• We value experience planning and leading technical initiatives or projects of various scopes and sizes
• You have or are currently mentoring other developers

Bonus Points:

• Exposure and some working experience with data warehouses like Redshift
• You have a deep knowledge of Docker and exposure to container orchestration tools like Kubernetes or ECS
• Experience with Kafka
• Experience with Apache Spark data processing framework 
• You have exposure to Infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform

What we offer:

• Career development; we believe in mentorship and investing in your learning, supporting you to achieve your goals
• Top industry health benefits, including vision and dental 
• Your own health/wellness account to spend each year
• RRSP Contributions (Canada), 401K Contributions (USA)
• Generous vacation and Maternity/Parental leave top-up program
• Corporate discount for gym memberships for you and your family
• Work from almost anywhere in the world for part of the year
• Winter break shutdown and a whole lot more!

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.

About Wattpad

Who are we? Entrepreneurs and Do-ers. Our vision is to entertain and connect the world through stories, and our mission is to use the power of community and technology to unleash the full potential of stories to the world.

What does that mean? We are visionaries, community builders, passionate problem solvers, storytellers, coffee snobs (tea drinkers, too!), curious by nature, and culturally diverse.

What are we obsessed with? Our users. Solving complex problems and maximizing flow. Learning constantly. Building the next great storytelling product. Finding the greatest stories ever told. Dogs (and cats), coffee, and good snacks.

How do we work? Autonomously, collaboratively, respectfully. Balancing with work, family, and play...and all while having a great time.

Wattpad is a remote friendly company and encourages remote candidates to apply as long as they are located and authorized to work in either the US or Canada (excluding Quebec) as a precondition of employment. We are not able to sponsor applicants for work permits.

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.

Culture and Diversity

Wattpad is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate. Period. 

Wattpad welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process. We have taken a leadership position on creating a culture and an organization that truly values diversity. We are committed to fostering a global team that reflects the diversity of the Wattpad community. At Wattpad, we believe cultural fit doesn’t mean culturally identical, and diversity of thought helps us to challenge one another to think big and think differently. We consider employment applicants without regard to age, race, colour, national origin, citizenship, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, veteran status, marital status, disability status or any other protected status.

If you have any special needs or accessibility requirements, please let us know. We will do our utmost to accommodate, in accordance with applicable local legislation.

Don’t meet all the requirements? Studies show women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs if they do not meet all the qualifications. Therefore, in an effort to build a more diverse workplace, we encourage you to apply anyways. You might actually be the right person or you may be a good fit for a number of other openings we currently have.