Backend Technical Lead - Product Engineering

Join Wordly's fast growing global team!

In this backend-focused role within Wordly’s Customer Experience engineering group, you will lead the development of new product features across the entire development lifecycle. For a given set of product requirements, you will drive technical decisions that will produce a robust, scalable software solution that meets the needs of our users while working within the bounds of Wordly’s existing system architecture. You will scope out the work required to execute your vision and break it down into smaller technical tasks that can be delegated to your team. As someone who leads by example, you will be working side-by-side with them: writing code, solving problems, and assisting team members, ensuring that everyone stays collectively focused on shipping out the feature.

Beyond achieving product goals, you care about your colleagues and provide constant, technical mentorship that facilitates their continued professional development. You ensure that engineering processes are being followed and are an active participant in helping create new processes and updating existing processes as the organization continues to evolve.

Individually, through years of experience, you consider yourself a craftsperson. You take a lot of pride in the code that you write and in how you architect your solutions. You always strive for clean, maintainable, well-tested code. To achieve your goals, you effectively employ an arsenal of proven design patterns that you’ve picked up over the years. You are just as comfortable working within a complex, interconnected system as you are working within the most basic of functions.

• 7+ years of hands-on experience in architecting, implementing, and delivering software engineering solutions from a set of product requirements.

• 2+ years of experience in leading the development of product features either as a senior engineer or technical lead.

• Advanced to expert-level knowledge of the Java and/or Kotlin programming languages.

• Extensive experience working within a microservice-based system architecture that is hosted on a cloud platform.

• Experience working with inversion-of-control frameworks such as Micronaut, Spring Boot, etc.

• Experience working in distributed and multi-threaded environments with a solid understanding of concurrency principles, patterns, and best practices.

• Significant experience in designing APIs.

• Familiarity with distributed messaging brokers and/or event streaming platforms such as RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ, Kafka, etc.

• Experience working with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab, Travis CI, etc.) and container orchestration platforms (e.g., Kubernetes).

• Experienced in mentoring junior colleagues with respect to their technical skills.

• Self-motivated and able to work independently with minimal supervision. Can take initiative and make informed decisions as needed.

• Strong problem-solving skills. Can devise creative solutions and workarounds when problems arise.

• Comfortable working with a fully remote team.

In addition to the minimum qualifications, the ideal candidate meets some or all of the following desired qualifications.

• Experience in processing real-time media streams, especially audio streams.

• Solid understanding of various digital audio concepts (e.g., encoding/decoding, sample rates, FFTs, compression, filtering, etc.).

• Extensive experience working with MongoDB and Redis.

• Experience working with the Google Cloud Platform.

• Good familiarity with the JavaScript and/or TypeScript languages.

• B.S. degree in Computer Science or equivalent from an accredited institution.

• Collaborate with product managers, engineering managers, designers, and other stakeholders to gain a complete understanding of the products/features that you will be assigned to build.

• Architect comprehensive software solutions from a set of product requirements.

• Break down complex engineering projects into smaller, manageable tasks with clear outcomes that can be delegated to other engineers working with you.

• Ensure that team members stay focused and that projects remain on schedule. Be able to identify and communicate technical issues and progress to stakeholders.

• Work with other cross-functional development teams as needed to accomplish business and engineering objectives.

• Apply and encourage the use of proven software design patterns and principles throughout development.

• Spend a significant amount of time writing quality code that is clean, maintainable, documented, and well tested.

• Participate in and provide input on system designs, code reviews, incident postmortems, process improvements, and other collaborative, engineering exercises.

• Ensure that engineering processes are being followed and that technical contributions meet the standards of the organization.

• Mentor other engineers to advance the professional development of their technical skills and their understanding of good engineering practices.

• Positively contribute to Wordly’s engineering culture and processes to maintain a cooperative and supportive environment for all.

Located in Los Altos, California, Wordly is an exciting tech startup that is looking to grow its engineering and GTM teams! From virtual meetings to large, in-person conference venues, Wordly strives to provide high quality, real-time translation services in 50+ languages to anyone, anywhere. 

Wordly caters to numerous customers around the world which include local organizations and businesses; government entities; Fortune 500 companies; and much, much more. While this is a fully remote position, office space in Los Altos, California is available for San Francisco Bay Area residents that wish to utilize it.

To learn more about Wordly visit www.wordly.ai and follow us on our LinkedIn page.