Senior Backend Engineer

Role Description

We’re hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to own meaningful parts of Wand’s backend and help us drive the work forward. You’ll partner closely with our Head of Engineering and the application teams who build on top of your work. There are two threads in the job: building and owning substantial parts of the backend, and helping run it — making the architectural calls the team will live with, and pushing cross-cutting initiatives forward.

This is a senior individual contributor role. You’re self-managing, opinionated, and willing to drop into TypeScript in the Electron app or have a view on a UX workflow when that’s what the work needs. You’ll measure your own success by what the team shipped because the backend made it easy.

What You’ll Do

• Own meaningful parts of the backend.
• Scope, design, ship, and stabilize the services the rest of the product depends on.
• Make the architectural calls — data model evolution, caching boundaries, where to spend latency budget, when to refactor and when to rewrite.
• Work fluidly across the data layer (MySQL, MariaDB, Firestore).
• Treat infrastructure as code as part of the job.
• Treat performance, observability, and operational health as part of “done.”
• Move across the stack when the work demands it.
• Drive the backend roadmap.
• Provide substantive code review, mentor where it lands naturally, and raise the level of design discussions.
• Bring thoughtfulness and genuine passion for the work.

Qualifications

• 6+ years building production backend systems, ideally for a consumer product with real scale.
• Strong with PHP 8.2 (Laravel or Symfony), or comparable depth in another modern web stack.
• Relational data modeling at scale (MySQL, MariaDB, or Postgres).
• Comfortable across data stores (document or NoSQL database).
• Infrastructure as code is a default (Terraform, Ansible, or comparable).
• Comfortable working full stack.
• Outcome-oriented and high ownership.
• Fluent with the AI tooling that’s reshaping how engineers work.
• Opinions on UX workflows and product.
• Strong written and verbal communication.
• Self-managing.

Requirements

• Experience inside an Electron app at depth.
• MariaDB specifically.
• GCP experience.
• Cloudflare ecosystem experience.
• gRPC, Protocol Buffers, or FlatBuffers comfort.
• Redis or similar caching at scale.
• Datadog or comparable observability tooling.
• LLM and vector DB familiarity.
• Cross-origin / cross-process communication.
• Consumer SaaS background.
• PC gamer.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and equity package.
• Fully remote work arrangement.
• The chance to build core infrastructure for an audience of 40M+ players.
• A team of people who genuinely love games, move incredibly fast, and care deeply about what they build.

How to Apply

Please submit your resume. Join us in creating the ultimate PC gaming companion.

Wand is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates regardless of background.