Senior Manager, Backend
About The Position
The Senior Manager of Backend Engineering leads the teams responsible for core systems powering the WeightWatchers member experience. The role builds, scales, and mentors high-performing engineering teams to deliver a member platform that is simple, fast, safe, and scalable. It is accountable for the health, growth, and delivery of multiple backend squads, partnering with Infrastructure, Product, Data, and Design to turn technical strategy into reliable systems for members worldwide. The position covers people leadership and team growth; delivery and operational excellence; backend platform and data integrity; and strategic partnership and communication. The manager leads multi-quarter technical strategies, establishes service-level indicators and objectives, improves delivery processes, oversees services for member identity, food databases, and tracking, and guides modernization toward cloud architectures and event-driven patterns. The role also supports reliable data for personalization and experimentation, embeds security and compliance practices, and balances sustainable system scaling with cloud costs.
Requirements
- Proven track record managing and scaling engineering teams at a system-wide level.
- At least 8 years of backend engineering experience.
- At least 3 years in a formal management or leadership role for large-scale consumer systems.
- Strong understanding of modern distributed systems, AWS, APIs, and data modeling in high-scale environments.
- Proven ability to lead cross-team initiatives from design through successful production adoption.
- Clear documentation and ability to influence stakeholders across competing priorities.
- Ability to connect team priorities to member outcomes and business impact, and to shift between roadmap planning and execution details.
Nice To Haves
- Degree in Computer Science or Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
Responsibilities
- Recruit, manage, mentor, and develop backend engineers from entry-level through Principal level.
- Foster an engineering culture centered on operational readiness, documentation, incident learning, and continuous improvement.
- Establish clear ownership boundaries and empower teams to deliver quickly without fragmenting the broader ecosystem.
- Drive execution of multi-quarter technical strategies for the member platform.
- Ensure teams define and meet SLIs and SLOs that reflect member experience, reliability, and performance.
- Identify and remove structural bottlenecks, including brittle integrations and duplicated microservices.
- Oversee backend services for member identity, food databases, and tracking foundations to ensure trustworthiness and scalability.
- Partner with Data and ML teams to provide reliable, well-modeled data for personalization and experimentation.
- Lead modernization toward cloud architectures and event-driven patterns.
- Partner with Product and Design to build backend systems that support iteration and measurable outcomes.
- Communicate technical debt, risks, and architectural needs as clear options and consequences to executive and cross-functional stakeholders.
- Manage end-to-end delivery of backend features and platform components across multiple squads.
- Lead performance reviews, career development discussions, and workforce planning.
- Review technical designs and guide decisions involving tradeoffs among speed, quality, and cost.
- Embed security and compliance, including HIPAA-adjacent workflows, into standard team practices.
- Promote cost-aware scaling and balance cloud costs through a FinOps mindset.
Benefits
- Hybrid work environment intended to support work-life balance.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
