Staff Backend Architect: APIs, Microservices, & Scale

WEX, Inc.; Salt Lake City (UT); On-site; USD 141,000 - 173,000; Full time

Job summary

WEX, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to design, develop, and operate highly scalable backend services powering our mobile and web platforms for owner-operators and fleets. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver secure, resilient APIs and distributed systems that scale with growth.

The role emphasizes architecture leadership, performance optimization, and automated testing, with strong focus on observability, security, and reliable deployment pipelines.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS, software engineering, or related field.
• 8–10 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong expertise in Java and Spring Boot for enterprise backend.
• Experience designing RESTful APIs and distributed microservices.
• Relational databases knowledge with PostgreSQL and SQL optimization.
• Security, OAuth2, JWT, and secure coding practices.
• Experience with Kafka, Redis, and async messaging.
• CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and modern delivery.
• Observability with logging, metrics, tracing, monitoring.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and operate scalable, secure backend services.
• Architect distributed microservices and REST APIs for mobile/web use.
• Lead architecture discussions and produce design docs.
• Improve performance via DB design, indexing, and queries.
• Develop automated tests: unit, integration, performance, load.
• Enhance reliability with observability, tracing, health checks, alerts.
• Drive CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and tooling.
• Collaborate with Product, Mobile, Web, Security, and DevOps teams.
• Mentor engineers, conduct code reviews, and raise quality.
• Troubleshoot production issues and perform RCA.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

REST APIs

Distributed systems

PostgreSQL

Security

Kafka

Redis

CI/CD

Observability

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

OpenTelemetry

Grafana

Prometheus

Job description

WEX, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to design, develop, and operate highly scalable backend services powering our mobile and web platforms for owner-operators and fleets. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver secure, resilient APIs and distributed systems that scale with growth.

The role emphasizes architecture leadership, performance optimization, and automated testing, with strong focus on observability, security, and reliable deployment pipelines.