Staff Backend Architect & Tech Lead

Wex; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 141,000 - 173,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental and vision insurances

Retirement savings plan

Paid time off

Job summary

WEX in Boston, MA is seeking a Staff Software Engineer with deep backend expertise to design, build, and operate scalable, secure services powering our mobile and web apps. You will collaborate across product, mobile, web, security, and DevOps teams to deliver robust APIs and distributed systems that fuel driver and fleet experiences.

You’ll lead architecture discussions, optimize databases, implement testing, observability, and CI/CD, mentor engineers, and help drive engineering best practices.

Qualifications

• 8–10 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong expertise in Java and Spring Boot for backend applications.
• Experience designing and developing RESTful APIs and distributed microservices.
• Solid understanding of object-oriented design, data structures, algorithms, and software design principles.
• Experience with PostgreSQL or other relational databases, including schema design and indexing.
• Experience building scalable, secure, highly available distributed systems.
• Understanding of authentication, authorization, API security (OAuth2, JWT).
• Experience with asynchronous messaging (Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Familiarity with caching technologies (Redis).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automated testing.
• Knowledge of observability: logging, metrics, tracing, monitoring.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable, secure backend services using Java, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, and REST APIs.
• Architect and build distributed microservices that are observable, resilient, and maintainable.
• Lead architecture discussions and produce design documents.
• Optimize database design, queries, indexing, and transaction management.
• Develop automated testing strategies (unit, integration, contract, performance, load).
• Improve reliability with observability, logging, tracing, health monitoring, and alerting.
• Drive platform improvements by addressing technical debt and bottlenecks.
• Build and enhance CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation.
• Collaborate with Product, Mobile, Web, Security, Infra, and DevOps teams.
• Mentor engineers and promote engineering best practices.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

REST APIs

Microservices

PostgreSQL

Distributed systems

OAuth2/JWT

Kafka/RabbitMQ

CI/CD

Observability

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Master's degree (preferred)

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

OpenTelemetry

Job description

WEX in Boston, MA is seeking a Staff Software Engineer with deep backend expertise to design, build, and operate scalable, secure services powering our mobile and web apps. You will collaborate across product, mobile, web, security, and DevOps teams to deliver robust APIs and distributed systems that fuel driver and fleet experiences.

You’ll lead architecture discussions, optimize databases, implement testing, observability, and CI/CD, mentor engineers, and help drive engineering best practices.