Senior Backend Engineer

WeightWatchers is a global digital health company and the world’s #1 doctor-recommended, clinically studied behavioral weight health program. As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will be responsible for building and scaling systems that enhance the member experience, focusing on technical design and implementation of backend services.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and Scale the Member Experience Platform
• Feature Ownership: Lead the backend design and implementation of services that connect our mobile and web clients to scalable APIs and data stores
• Performance Engineering: Identify and resolve latency and availability bottlenecks in critical member flows like food search, logging, and onboarding
• Standardization: Implement standardized patterns for service contracts, event-driven architecture, and data ownership to ensure consistent delivery across the platform
• Modernize Data and Tracking Foundations
• Food Database Excellence: Build and maintain high-performance services to improve search relevance and data quality for our global food database
• State Management: Help define how member data is cached, synced, and audited across services to minimize inconsistencies and improve system observability
• Robust Interfaces: Establish clean interfaces between operational systems and ML pipelines to ensure personalization is powered by reliable data
• Reliability and Operational Excellence
• SLO-Driven Development: Define and monitor SLIs/SLOs for your services, ensuring they meet member expectations for performance and uptime
• Resiliency Patterns: Implement backend resiliency strategies such as circuit breaking, retries, and graceful degradation for major member workflows
• Security & Compliance: Partner with Security teams to embed automated controls into backend services, particularly for sensitive health-related data
• Technical Design: Create detailed technical designs and lead code reviews for complex backend features, ensuring high standards of maintainability
• Execution: Drive the delivery of multi-sprint projects, balancing rapid iteration with technical debt management and long-term stability
• Mentorship: Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of incident learning and operational readiness
• Collaboration: Partner closely with Infrastructure engineering, Product, Data Science, and Design to translate business requirements into efficient, scalable backend systems
• Problem Solving: Identify and resolve structural bottlenecks in existing services, such as data inconsistencies or brittle integrations

Requirements:

• 5-8+ years of experience building backend systems for large-scale consumer applications (e.g., APIs, microservices, data stores)
• Deep understanding of building large-scale distributed systems, APIs, and event-driven architectures
• Expertise in modern cloud architectures (AWS), database design, and building for high-availability
• Proven ability to design data models that support complex product workflows and analytics needs
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills for documenting architectural decisions and collaborating across teams
• Ownership-minded: You take pride in the quality of your code and the operational health of the services you manage
• Pragmatic: You make technical choices based on member outcomes and business impact, avoiding unnecessary complexity
• Collaborative: You build trust through clear communication, strong documentation, and predictable follow-through
• Java or Go experience preferred