Lead Backend & API Engineer

WEX, Inc.; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 141,000 - 173,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental and vision insurance

401(k) retirement plan

Bonus eligibility

Job summary

WEX, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to design, build, and operate scalable backend services powering our mobile and web applications.

You will lead architecture discussions, craft RESTful APIs, and drive the development of distributed microservices with strong security and observability. You will collaborate with Product, Mobile, Web, Security, and DevOps teams to deliver reliable customer experiences.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 8-10 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong expertise in Java and Spring Boot for backend applications.
• Experience designing RESTful APIs and distributed microservices.
• Solid understanding of OO design, data structures, algorithms, and software design principles.
• Experience with PostgreSQL or relational databases, including schema design and optimization.
• Experience building scalable, secure, highly available distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of authentication/authorization, API security, OAuth2, JWT.
• Experience with asynchronous messaging (Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Familiarity with Redis and distributed caching strategies.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automated testing.
• Understanding observability (logging, metrics, tracing, monitoring, alerting).
• Experience collaborating with mobile teams and APIs for iOS/Android.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, mentoring, and leadership skills.
• Hands-on use of AI coding assistants and dev tools to accelerate development.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and operate scalable, secure, backend services powering mobile and web apps.
• Architect and build distributed microservices that are resilient and observable.
• Design REST APIs for seamless integration with mobile, web, and partner systems.
• Lead architecture discussions and drive engineering alignment.
• Optimize database design, queries, indexing, and transactions.
• Develop comprehensive automated testing strategies covering unit to load tests.
• Improve reliability with observability, logging, tracing, and health monitoring.
• Identify technical debt and bottlenecks, driving platform improvements.
• Build and enhance CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation.
• Collaborate with Product, Mobile, Web, Security, Infrastructure, and DevOps teams.
• Lead code reviews, mentor engineers, and elevate engineering standards.
• Troubleshoot production issues, perform RCA, and implement fixes.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and produce design recommendations.
• Create technical docs: architecture, APIs, runbooks, readiness plans.
• Design high-availability services with retries, circuit breakers, caching, and rate limiting.
• Drive cross-functional initiatives as a technical lead or STO.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

REST APIs

Distributed microservices

OAuth2 / JWT

Kafka / RabbitMQ

PostgreSQL

Caching (Redis)

CI/CD

Observability

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

OpenTelemetry

Android / iOS API

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering

Master's degree (preferred)

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

OpenTelemetry

Grafana/Prometheus

Job description

WEX, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to design, build, and operate scalable backend services powering our mobile and web applications.

You will lead architecture discussions, craft RESTful APIs, and drive the development of distributed microservices with strong security and observability. You will collaborate with Product, Mobile, Web, Security, and DevOps teams to deliver reliable customer experiences.