Staff Backend Engineer

📋 Description

• • Architect and deliver high-impact backend features that power Wealthfront’s automated financial services, directly influencing how 350,000+ clients save, invest, and plan for their future. You will own the full lifecycle—from ideation and design to deployment and post-launch optimization—while embedding automated instrumentation that keeps operational toil near zero.
• • Collaborate with cross-functional squads of product managers, designers, data scientists, and mobile engineers to translate ambitious product visions into scalable Java services. Your code will integrate seamlessly with our event-driven architecture, leveraging functional programming paradigms to ensure correctness and maintainability at scale.
• • Champion reliability and performance by continuously profiling distributed systems, tuning SQL queries against MySQL and PostgreSQL clusters, and refactoring legacy components to eliminate bottlenecks. You’ll treat every latency spike or error budget breach as a learning opportunity, feeding insights back into the codebase and our blameless post-mortems.
• • Serve as a builder-operator: write the feature, ship it with automated canary pipelines, and keep it healthy in production. You will join a weekly on-call rotation where alerts are actionable, dashboards are curated, and every page is an invitation to automate the fix permanently.
• • Elevate engineering excellence through rigorous test-driven development. We do not merge code without 100 % automated test coverage and continuous integration gates. You will author unit, integration, and property-based tests that run in minutes, not hours, and you will coach teammates to do the same.
• • Mentor junior and mid-level engineers via pair programming, design reviews, and career-development conversations. Your feedback in weekly 1:1s and semi-annual reviews will shape the next generation of Wealthfront leaders while reinforcing our culture of continuous learning.
• • Influence technical strategy by participating in architecture guilds, proposing new patterns (e.g., migrating batch Spark pipelines to real-time streaming), and evaluating emerging technologies. Decisions you make today will underpin products we launch years from now.
• • Contribute to recruiting excellence: refine job specs, conduct technical interviews, and represent Wealthfront at university and industry events. Your ability to articulate our engineering philosophy will attract the high-caliber talent that sustains our growth.
• • Drive measurable business impact. Whether you’re shaving milliseconds off trade-execution latency or adding a new tax-efficient rebalancing algorithm, your work will be A/B tested, monitored, and celebrated when client outcomes improve.