• Own execution of the engineering strategy • Partner closely with the CTO and cross-functional leaders to translate company priorities into clear plans and delivery outcomes. • Lead and support multiple engineering teams • Provide leadership across squads, ensuring teams are aligned, unblocked, and consistently delivering meaningful business impact. • Build high-performing teams through hiring and coaching • Recruit, onboard, and retain top engineering talent, while developing engineers and managers through feedback, mentorship, and career support. • Create clarity, structure, and accountability • Help teams navigate ambiguity, set goals, define success metrics, and improve predictability of delivery. • Drive engineering excellence and pragmatic technical decision-making • Support technical direction, guide trade-offs, and ensure teams build scalable and maintainable systems. • Strengthen collaboration across Product, Design, and Data • Foster strong partnerships across functions to ensure smooth execution and shared ownership of outcomes. • Champion culture and ways of working • Promote psychological safety, continuous improvement, and an environment where engineers can do their best work.

• Own the research and intelligence direction of the AI system. • Define how AI reasons, evaluates, and improves in a product used with high frequency. • Set and evolve the research direction for core intelligence, including context representation, memory, reasoning, planning, and orchestration. • Decide when to design new model architectures versus adapting or leveraging frontier open-source or commercial models. • Define evaluation frameworks that measure real-world usefulness, robustness, safety, and long-term behavior – not benchmark vanity. • Own alignment, safety, and guardrail strategy as first-class product concerns. • Guide exploration of frontier techniques such as retrieval-augmented training, mixture-of-experts, distillation, multi-agent orchestration, and multimodal systems. • Shape early product intelligence direction in close partnership with product and application engineering. • Set the technical bar for research rigor, judgment, and taste across the organization.

• Own the application engineering strategy and execution across backend, mobile, and desktop. • Lead and grow a small, senior applications team, including backend, mobile, and desktop engineers. • Set the architectural direction for AI-powered product workflows, APIs, and client integrations. • Ensure AI capabilities are integrated into the product with clear abstractions, predictable behavior, and graceful failure modes. • Partner closely with Machine Learning leadership to translate model capability into shippable product features. • Make high-impact decisions across latency, cost, reliability, security, and user experience. • Establish a strong execution culture through code reviews, design reviews, and hands-on technical leadership. • Ensure production readiness: observability, monitoring, retries, fallbacks, privacy, and cost controls. • Balance speed and discipline – shipping quickly without compromising long-term system quality.

This description is a summary of our understanding of the job description. Click on 'Apply' button to find out more. 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.