[Hiring] Senior Manager, Backend @WeightWatchers

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.

You will be responsible for the health, growth, and delivery of multiple backend squads. You will partner closely with Infra, Product, Data, and Design to turn technical strategy into a reliable reality for millions of members worldwide.

1) 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.

2) 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.

3) 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.

4) 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.

Key Responsibilities

• 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.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in backend engineering with 3+ years in a formal management or leadership role for large-scale consumer systems.
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Requirements

• 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 influence stakeholders across competing priorities.
• Systems Thinker: Ability to zoom from high-level roadmap planning to deep-diving into execution details when necessary.
• 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.

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.

Company Description

At WeightWatchers, our mission is to build a worldwide community connected by healthy habits. If that resonates with you, then we would love to talk. WeightWatchers values developing community within our employee population as well. We have a hybrid work environment to allow our employees to find the right work-life balance.

It is our priority to cultivate a diverse and inclusive workplace. We are committed as individuals, as an organization, and as fellow humans, to advocate for and support our employees, our members, and our communities. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and we do not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, color, creed, national origin, marital status, age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, veteran status, or disability.