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Role Description

As a Senior Manager of Backend Engineering, you will lead the teams responsible for the core systems that power the WeightWatchers member experience. Your mission is to build, scale, and mentor high-performing engineering teams that deliver a member platform that is simple, fast, safe, and scalable.

• People Leadership and Team Growth
  • Talent Development: Recruit, manage, and mentor a diverse team of backend engineers, from entry-level to Principal level.
  • Culture of Excellence: Foster an engineering culture focused on operational readiness, documentation, incident learning, and continuous improvement.
  • Empowerment: Create an environment where teams have clear ownership boundaries and the autonomy to ship quickly without fragmenting the ecosystem.
• Delivery and Operational Excellence
  • Execution Roadmap: Drive the execution of multi-quarter technical strategies for the member platform, aligning your teams on the "why," "what," and "how".
  • SLO-Driven Management: Ensure teams define and meet SLIs/SLOs that reflect member happiness, prioritizing reliability and performance in "moments that matter".
  • Process Optimization: Identify and remove structural bottlenecks - such as brittle integrations or duplicated micro-services - to accelerate delivery across product squads.
• Backend Platform and Data Integrity
  • Strategic Oversight: Oversee the backend services powering member identity, food databases, and tracking foundations to ensure they are trustworthy and scalable.
  • Data Stewardship: Partner with Data and ML teams to ensure backend systems provide reliable, well-modeled data for journey personalization and experimentation.
  • Modernization: Lead your teams through the transition to modern cloud architectures and event-driven patterns that support a global digital health platform.
• Strategic Partnership and Communication
  • Cross-Functional Alignment: Act as a key partner to Product and Design to ensure backend systems are built for iteration and measurable outcomes.
  • Technical Advocacy: Translate technical debt, risks, and architectural needs into crisp options and consequences for executive and cross-functional forums.
  • Trust Building: Build trust through clarity, predictable follow-through, and calm leadership under pressure.

Qualifications

• Leader of Leaders: Proven track record of managing and scaling engineering teams at a system-wide level.
• Pragmatic Manager: Anchor team priorities in member outcomes and business impact, avoiding unnecessary complexity.
• Effective Communicator: Produce clear documentation and can influence stakeholders across competing priorities.
• Systems Thinker: Ability to zoom from high-level roadmap planning to deep-diving into execution details when necessary.
• Experience: 8+ years in backend engineering with 3+ years in a formal management or leadership role for large-scale consumer systems.
• Technical Depth: Strong understanding of modern distributed systems (AWS), APIs, and data modeling for high-scale environments.
• Execution Track Record: Proven ability to lead cross-team initiatives from design through successful production adoption.
• Educational Background: Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Requirements

• Manage the end-to-end delivery of backend features and platform components across multiple squads.
• Lead performance reviews, career development discussions, and workforce planning for your organization.
• Review technical designs and drive decision-making on hard tradeoffs between speed, quality, and cost.
• Embed security and compliance (HIPAA-adjacent workflows) into standard team practices.
• Drive a "FinOps" mindset, ensuring backend systems scale sustainably while balancing cloud costs.

Benefits

• Base salary may vary depending on skills, experience, and location.
• This role is also eligible for a comprehensive benefits package and annual bonus program.
• Hybrid work environment to allow employees to find the right work-life balance.