Staff Backend Engineer

As a Staff Backend Engineer for Workiva Carbon, you’ll play a central role in guiding, mentoring, and leading engineers, while also helping shape the technological vision of our backend environment. You’ll lead efforts to elevate the backend developer experience, championing the implementation of cutting-edge capabilities. You’ll be instrumental in fortifying the scalability, adaptability, and expansiveness of our web applications.

Through close collaboration with our talented engineering and design cohorts, you will drive the delivery of top-tier solutions that exceed our customers' expectations.
 

What You’ll Do

• Develop and enhance the backend services for the carbon application, consider how architectural changes impact downstream teams

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure seamless integration and a cohesive user experience

• Optimize APIs performance and stability to deliver a smooth user experience

• Collaborate with product owners, designers, and other stakeholders to understand and refine project requirements and ensure alignment with product vision and strategy

• Write clean, efficient and maintainable code that follows industry best practices and coding standards

• Participate in code reviews and provide constructive feedback to team members to ensure code quality and consistency

• Deliver and document team or group level technical solutions that meet or exceed customer expectations

• Develop and execute comprehensive test plans and automated tests (unit, integration, functional, etc.) with Workiva solutions in mind to ensure software quality and reliability

• Debug and troubleshoot complex issues across multiple service and application contexts using tools and techniques appropriate for the problem

• Collaborate with support teams in triaging and resolving production issues to ensure customer satisfaction

• Participate in product discovery activities with customers and stakeholders to gain insights, validate hypotheses, and identify opportunities for innovation

• Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to identify problems, suggest solutions, and drive continuous improvement

• Mentor and coach other engineers both technically and culturally, providing guidance and support to help them grow and achieve their full potential

• Communicate complex technical issues to both technical and non-technical audiences, using clear and concise language

What You’ll Need

Minimum Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in building backend services for web applications

• Undergraduate degree or equivalent combination of education and experience in a related field​; an advanced degree may be considered in lieu of professional experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Expertise in object-oriented software design and working with cloud-based distributed systems

• Strong experience in building large scale TypeScript application architecture

• Proven experience of building applications with Typescript

• Expertise in debugging complex systems

• Experience as a technical mentor, with the ability to coach and mentor junior engineers

• Experience working in an agile development environment preferred, with a focus on continuous improvement and delivery

• Experience developing for service-oriented architecture is a plus

• Exposure to SaaS product-engineering development

• Understanding of event-driven architecture

• Strong communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to communicate complex technical issues to both technical and non-technical audiences

• Strong problem-solving, critical thinking, and adaptability skills, with a commitment to staying up-to-date with new technologies and best practices in software engineering

Physical Requirements and Working Conditions

• 10% travel for customer and internal meetings 

• Reliable internet access for any period of time working remotely and not in a Workiva office

• May require after-hours support to resolve critical customer issues