[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, people 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 Data 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:

• As a Senior Data Platform Engineer, you’ll play a key role in evolving our real-time data infrastructure to meet the scale and complexity of our rapidly growing business. You’ll take technical ownership of major components, lead design and architecture decisions, mentor team members, and drive long-term improvements in our systems' performance, reliability, and scalability.
• Leading the design, implementation, and scaling of real-time distributed systems that serve millions of users per day
• Building and evolving high-performance microservices in Golang and Python running on AWS
• Scaling and hardening our Kafka-based event platform, currently processing over 200K messages per second
• Driving technical excellence across the team by identifying performance bottlenecks, improving system observability, and reducing operational overhead
• Taking ownership of infrastructure, ensuring high availability and resilience across our platform
• Writing robust unit, integration, and service-level tests, and reviewing others’ code with a mentorship mindset
• Driving adoption of new technologies and architectural patterns to future-proof our systems
• Partnering with cross-functional stakeholders (Data Science, Analytics, Security, Product, etc.) to deliver platform capabilities that enable innovation
• Mentoring and guiding engineers through technical challenges and design decisions

What we're looking for:

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong focus on distributed backend systems
• Experience planning and leading medium to large technical initiatives involving multiple members from your team
• Deep experience with Golang and/or Python, including building and operating high traffic production services
• Proven success in designing and operating real-time data systems using tools like Kafka, Flink, or Kinesis
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure (especially AWS) and how to build scalable, observable systems
• Strong Interest or familiarity  working with large-scale data platforms and technologies like EMR, Glue, Airflow, Dataproc, Redshift, Spark, or DMS
• Experience working on backend systems that operate 24/7 and require high reliability
• Strong Interest or familiarity working with information retrieval systems such as Elasticsearch, time-series databases, or vector databases
• Passion for writing clean, maintainable code and for improving systems over time
• You have or are currently mentoring other developers

Bonus Points:

• Experience with Redshift, Snowflake or similar columnar data warehouses
• Deep knowledge of Docker and container orchestration tools like Kubernetes or ECS
• Exposure to Infrastructure-as-Code tools like Terraform or CloudFormation
• Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines or improving deployment automation

What we offer:

• Competitive salary
• Career development; we believe in mentorship and supporting you to achieve your goals
• Health benefits, fully covered by us!
• RRSP Contributions
• Generous vacation and Parental Leave Top-up
• Corporate discount for gym membership for you and your family
• Beautiful offices in downtown Toronto and Halifax, with easy access to transit
• 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.