Simplifying the business of running a business.
Senior Software Engineer, AI-Augmented Backend
Location
California + 5 moreAll locations: California | Maine | Massachusetts | Texas | Utah | Washington
Posted
3 days ago
Salary
$121.5K - $145.5K / year
Seniority
Senior
Job Description
Senior Software Engineer, AI-Augmented Backend
WEX
• Own the design and implementation of complex backend services in Java and Spring Boot, from architecture through production rollout and operability. • Drive the incremental migration of legacy functionality toward REST using the Strangler pattern. • Design event-driven data flows (CDC pipelines, schema evolution, idempotent consumers) that keep distributed systems consistent under load. • Make and document consequential architecture decisions: API contracts, data models, consistency and transactional boundaries, failure modes, and rollback strategy. • Practice spec-driven development: define clear, machine-readable contracts and specifications (e.g., OpenAPI, schema definitions, RFC 9457 problem formats) before implementation, so that designs are unambiguous, reviewable, and consumable by both humans and AI agents. • Use AI-assisted development tooling effectively and responsibly — leveraging coding assistants and agentic workflows to accelerate delivery while owning correctness, review, and the security implications of generated code. • Own service availability and reliability: design for high availability, define and defend SLOs/error budgets, plan for graceful degradation and failover, and participate in on-call to keep critical payment paths healthy. • Build observability in from the start, not as an afterthought — instrument services with metrics, distributed tracing, and structured logging (OpenTelemetry / Micrometer), and use that telemetry to drive alerting, SLOs, and incident diagnosis. • Set the standard for code quality, testing, and operational readiness, and raise that standard through code review, design review, and technical mentorship of other engineers. • Build for a payments environment: handle sensitive cardholder data responsibly, design with PCI DSS requirements in mind, and bake in audit logging and least-privilege access from the start. • Diagnose and resolve performance and reliability issues across the stack — query optimization, caching strategy, indexing, connection management, and latency under real production traffic. • Partner with product, platform, and other engineering teams to break large initiatives into safe, shippable increments.
Job Requirements
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Deep expertise in Java and the Spring / Spring Boot ecosystem
- Strong command of relational databases — data modeling, query optimization, indexing, and transaction management
- Demonstrated experience designing and evolving RESTful APIs (versioning, error semantics, idempotency, backward compatibility)
- Hands-on experience with distributed and/or event-driven systems (e.g., Kafka or similar messaging/streaming platforms)
- Solid grounding in system design: you can reason about consistency, fault tolerance, scalability, and operational trade-offs, and communicate those trade-offs clearly
- Strong observability practice — you instrument services with metrics, distributed tracing, and structured logging using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana, and use that telemetry to define alerts, diagnose incidents, and understand production behavior.
- Experience operating high-availability services: defining and meeting SLOs, designing for failover and graceful degradation, and supporting production systems through on-call.
- Comfort with spec-driven development — designing against explicit contracts (OpenAPI, schemas, well-defined error formats) before writing code.
- Effective, judicious use of AI-assisted development tools (spec driven development, skills), with clear ownership of the correctness, quality, and security of the resulting code
- A demonstrated security mindset — you think about data protection, safe credential handling, and injection / input-validation risks by default.
- Strong written and verbal communication; able to influence technical direction across a team without formal authority.
- Working knowledge of Domain-Driven Design (aggregates, bounded contexts, application services).
- Experience with AWS and Kubernetes (EKS), HashiCorp Vault, and Redis-compatible caching at scale.
- Must be authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship.
Benefits
- health, dental and vision insurances
- retirement savings plan
- paid time off
- health savings account
- flexible spending accounts
- life insurance
- disability insurance
- tuition reimbursement
- more
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