Backend Engineering Lead

About Willow Wealth

Willow Wealth is a leading private markets investment platform. We believe that private market investment products should be a fundamental part of your portfolio. That’s why we’re expanding access to make it easier to get started. We partner with experienced investment managers to provide investors with a wide range of opportunities across real estate, venture capital, private equity, art, short-term notes, and more. All of our offerings are curated and vetted by our team to help investors diversify away from the stock market.

About the Role

You will lead within a core engineering team building the world’s most robust private markets platform to connect Investors with private market opportunities. You are a self-motivated hacker and tinkerer who can wear many hats and is excited to build business applications that drive revenue and delight our customers. You are entrepreneurial in nature and balance building the coolest product using bleeding-edge technology with an eye on go-to-market timing and established, stable technologies.

As a BackEnd Engineering Lead, you set the technical bar for the team. You’re passionate about well-designed, well-abstracted and reusable code that performs well and scales under increasing load, and you help others get there too. You love to learn and share new concepts and technologies, and you collaborate with smart people with an open mindset to deliver the “best” solution. You truly care about well-designed APIs, and get excited about event sourcing, reactive microservices and eventual consistency!

What you'll do

• Collaborate with a diverse global team of engineers, designers and product managers in an agile environment

• Develop and maintain a growing repository of reactive microservices based on a technology stack including Java, Spring (IoC, Data, Boot, Cloud), Docker/Kubernetes, leveraging messaging systems such as Kafka, relational databases including MySQL and Postgres, and NoSQL data stores such as Redis

• Lead tech initiatives end to end, communicating and building consensus with stakeholders, both within the team and outside it, technical and non-technical, so that requirements are well understood and everyone is aligned

• Own solution design for your team’s domain, and make sure architecture designs are consistent with the Willow Wealth platform’s overall direction

• Develop, mentor and empower other engineers by providing guidance, setting the right example, writing documentation and reviewing code

• Own services in production from release onwards: monitoring, extracting metrics, analyzing distributed traces, and driving incident follow-ups to resolution

• Show initiative to identify, architect and solve some of the most important and complex engineering challenges, both product-driven and otherwise

• Think in terms of continuous improvement: identify bottlenecks, optimize services for throughput and scalability, and tackle tech debt

Qualifications

• Degree in Computer Science/Engineering or similar, or equivalent experience

• 5+ years of software development experience in an equivalent role, including experience leading technical initiatives or mentoring other engineers

• Strong knowledge of Java (11+) programming, including web application frameworks and expertise designing and implementing RESTful APIs

• Hands-on experience with the Spring ecosystem, particularly Spring Boot, Data, IoC and Spring Cloud

• Strong foundations in object-oriented programming and a proven understanding of established software engineering practices resulting in clean, reusable and well-tested code

• A good understanding of microservice-based architectures; the advantages as well as the considerable added complexities

• An understanding of event sourcing and CQRS; knowledge of actor-based semantics and eventual consistency is an important plus

• Experience with pub-sub semantics and/or a messaging solution such as Kafka or RabbitMQ

• Expertise in writing and optimizing SQL, with a strong understanding of relational databases, indexes, joins and de/normalization (ideally MySQL/Postgres)

Preferred Qualifications

• An understanding of reactive principles and/or the CAP theorem

• Familiarity with functional programming, and the advantages of data immutability

• Experience working in containerized environments like Docker/Kubernetes

• Experience with NoSQL data stores such as Redis

• MSc or PhD in Computer Science/Engineering (Optional)

What's in it for you:

• Competitive compensation packages, including equity

• Health, dental & vision coverage

• Unlimited PTO

• Wellness stipend