Backend Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

*This role supports hybrid in-office US-based work in San Francisco - Bay Area, New York, and Seattle.

About Wealthfront Engineering

Wealthfront’s culture centers around continuous learning, innovation, and quality-driven software development. With high quality software as our ultimate engineering objective, our key tactic is automation:

• Wealthfront software automates the financial services we provide to our clients, and within these services we automate the collection of data that we learn from on our way to making our services even better.

• Wealthfront engineers function as builder/operators, with dual responsibility for building the system and operating it in production. Any toil that this brings about is automated away by engineers. This investment in automation is expected, and the prioritization of it is always built into our planning and execution.

• Wealthfront engineers automate our development processes. For example, Wealthfront engineers automate all of our testing. Manual testing is not part of the software development lifecycle at Wealthfront.

• Wealthfront engineers automate observability in case of failure. If something is up, our systems inform engineers appropriately. If our systems are quiet, they are healthy.

If you are drawn to being an engineer within such an environment, and having outsized impact as an engineer at a magnitude that is only available within a company achieving greatness at our size (~350 employees, half in engineering), then we want to hear from you! 

• We are looking for backend engineers to join our core product development teams. You’ll work with other engineers to design and build new features or enhance existing features. This work will add capabilities to the various backend systems and services that support Wealthfront’s products, and will be done with automated instrumentation and monitoring to require minimal operational maintenance.
• 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 might 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.

• You have 2-6 years of experience in developing backend components, services or APIs in Java or a similar language. You 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 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 related field.

• Pair you with a mentor who will guide you through our structured onboarding program
• Encourage you to work on projects that match your professional goals
• Support your professional development by providing feedback during weekly 1:1s and our semi-annual reviews
• Provide you autonomy so you can be a happy and successful member of our team

Estimated annual salary range: $150,000 - $189,000 plus equity and a discretionary bonus.

Benefits include medical, vision, dental, 401K plan, generous time off, parental leave, wellness reimbursements, professional development, employee investing discount, and more!

About Wealthfront

Here at Wealthfront, our mission is to create a financial system that favors people, not institutions. We do this by leveraging technology to build powerful, low-cost, and easy-to-use financial products that help modern investors grow and manage their money.

We started with the ambition to transform the investment advisory business. By automating strategies typically reserved for the wealthy, we unlocked access to high quality investment advice for a digitally-native generation that was underserved by traditional institutions. Since then, we've expanded to a full suite of products designed to help our clients turn their savings into long-term wealth, including:

• A Cash Account that, through our partner banks, offers one of the highest annual percentage yields on uninvested cash in the industry, while providing instant and secure access to your money with no account fees and a full suite of checking features.

• A zero-commission Stock Investing Account with 50+ handpicked collections that help DIY investors discover new companies and make smarter investing decisions.

• Multiple automated investing portfolios designed to unlock tax savings through sophisticated strategies like fixed income, tax-loss harvesting, and direct indexing—which we offer at industry-leading low costs and accessible minimums.

Our award-winning products have attracted over 1 million clients who trust us with more than $90 billion of their hard earned savings—and we're far from done. If you’re inspired to help us reshape the financial industry as we create our next chapter, let’s talk!

For more information please visit 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.

Please review our candidate privacy notice. 

Disclosures: All investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Tax-Loss Harvesting benefits vary depending on the client's entire tax and investment profile. Wealthfront doesn’t provide tax advice. The Cash Account is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC (“Wealthfront Brokerage”), Member of FINRA/SIPC. Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank. We convey funds to partner banks who accept and maintain deposits, provide the variable interest rate, and provide access to FDIC pass-through insurance. Investment management and advisory services–which are not FDIC insured–are provided by Wealthfront Advisers LLC (“Wealthfront Advisers”), an SEC-registered investment adviser. The checking features offered in the Wealthfront Cash Account are provided by Green Dot Bank, Member FDIC. Fees and Eligibility requirements may apply to certain checking features, please see the Deposit Account Agreement for details.

By “award-winning products”, please refer to for more information. Wealthfront Corporation oversees Total Client Assets and Trusted Clients through Wealthfront Advisers and Wealthfront Brokerage. Wealthfront Advisers and Wealthfront Brokerage are wholly owned subsidiaries of Wealthfront Corporation.