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Backend Tech Lead 🔥


About WealthfrontWealthfront’s vision is to make it delightfully easy to build long-term wealth on your own terms. This vision is relevant because millions more people are getting into the market early and investing their hard-earned savings in a handful of stocks. While this is a great way to start, it is inconsistent with building long-term wealth. We want to empower young investors to easily explore and execute on a wider range of investment strategies, and make informed investment decisions that are consistent with their values and beliefs while also making it effortless to grow and compound their savings exponentially. We believe that doing so will be transformational to their lives and their long-term future.

About Wealthfront EngineeringAt Wealthfront, engineering is the largest group with over 50% of the employees. Hence engineering culture permeates throughout the organization. You will work with and learn from invigorating colleagues who come from diverse backgrounds. Very few had a finance background before starting at Wealthfront. 

Given our size - 240 employees in total and 125 employees in Engineering, you have the ability to have an outsized impact, regardless of your industry tenure. Our Banking system was designed and developed by an engineer 3 years out of college. The Linking platform was developed by engineers with 6 years of industry experience. When you start, we will pair you up with a mentor who will guide you for as long as you want.

Our culture is optimized for continued learning and automation. At Wealthfront, we are builder/operators: engineers have the dual responsibility to build the system and operate the system in production, dealing with problems as they occur. This provides you with direct feedback on how your code performs in production. We preach and practice automation. As an engineer, you are expected to automate any toil you encounter. No permissions required, no prioritizations expected, no questions asked.

We are disciples of quality and we don’t have a separate QA organization. Engineers are expected to write automated test cases that build upon the existing test cases. For example, our investing algorithms have a dedicated suite of tests that runs full trading day simulations on a representative sample of real accounts. This testing framework allows us to test any code change against historical scenarios.

If our culture of learning, the potential to have a huge impact and our focus on quality resonates with you, then we want you!

* Note: This role has the option to be based in Palo Alto CA, Boston MA, or remote (U.S)

About the Role:

    • We are looking for a lead engineer to join our Trading Team. The Trading Team builds the systems that our clients trust to automatically manage and trade over $20B in assets according to their personalized investment plans using advanced tax-optimized investing strategies.
    • You will design and build new features or enhance existing features by adding capabilities to the various backend systems and services that support Wealthfront’s products, or by replacing those systems where appropriate. You will be responsible for systems end-to-end, from working with Product Managers and Investment Research to understand requirements, all the way through to implementation and deployment plus monitoring and operational support.
    • This is a mostly hands-on role, not an architect or similar position. You’ll spend most of your time directly contributing to the systems. As a senior engineer on the team, you’ll spend about 25% of your time enabling the team to be more successful by leading initiatives, breaking down complex systems into manageable components, discovering and articulating best practices, and mentoring junior team members.
    • You’ll help improve the maintainability and stability of our codebase by fixing issues and adding necessary enhancements to our existing backend systems. You’ll ensure that mission-critical backend systems and services operate smoothly in production by triaging and resolving operational issues as part of a team of on-call engineers. You’ll proactively identify opportunities for improving the reliability and scalability of our systems.
    • Additionally, you can play a part in evolving the engineering organization by participating in recruiting activities such as interviewing and attending career fairs and providing mentorship to other engineers on the team.

About You:

    • You have 6 or more years of experience in a professional software development role, with the most recent 4 or more years in developing backend components, services, or APIs in Java or a similar language, and the most recent 1 year or more specifically acting as a lead.
    • You can demonstrate knowledge and understanding of distributed systems and functional programming paradigms. You have knowledge of SQL and experience working with online data stores (ideally something like MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server but NoSQL is okay).
    • You have a passion for agile, test-driven development, continuous integration, and automated testing.
    • You also have a passion for working on platforms and backend systems that have measurable business impact and like working in a fast-paced cross-functional environment.
    • While not required, experience working with Spark pipelines is a plus along with knowledge of an ORM technology such as Hibernate.  Another plus is working with a dependency injection framework (one of Guice, Spring, Pico, Dagger).
    • You have either a BS or MS in computer science or a related field.


    • Everyone across the financial spectrum deserves to live secure and rewarding lives. In order to successfully serve clients across the United States, the Wealthfront team is focused on hiring team members with a diverse range of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
Everyone across the financial spectrum deserves to live secure and rewarding lives. In order to successfully serve clients across the United States, the Wealthfront team is focused on hiring team members with a diverse range of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.



About Wealthfront [1]

Wealthfront started with the ambition to transform the investment advisory business, with the goal to unlock access to high quality investment advice for millions who were underserved by the traditional institutions. We built the first automated investment product that allows you to invest in a personalized portfolio of thousands of companies in seconds for a remarkably low fee; we then expanded into banking which made it remarkably easy for people to automate their finances end-to-end and eliminated the hassle of money management, all of which resulted in attracting more than $27 billion of our client’s hard earned savings, created the robo-advisor category and transformed the broader industry. And yet, we have a long way to go to achieve our mission to build a financial system that favors people, not institutions. 



Wealthfront’s vision is to make it delightfully easy to build long-term wealth on your own terms. This vision is more relevant than ever because millions more people are getting into the market early and investing their hard earned savings in a handful of stocks. While this is a great way to start, it is inconsistent with building long-term wealth. We want to empower young investors to expand their horizon, and easily explore and execute on a wider range of investing strategies, make informed investment decisions that are consistent with their values and beliefs while also making it effortless to grow and compound their savings exponentially, that’s transformational to their lives and their long-term future. 

Please review our candidate privacy notice [2]Apply for this job [3]

  1. http://www.wealthfront.com/
  2. https://www.wealthfront.com/static/documents/candidate-privacy-notice.pdf
  3. https://jobs.lever.co/wealthfront/4ad21aac-86ca-4de0-87fd-900269d39516/apply

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