Jobs and Careers

Senior Backend Software Engineer

Washington, United Statesfull_timeVerifiedPosted 31 Mar 2025

💰 $199,300/yr($119,700/yr – $199,300/yr)

About the role

Job Description

Owned by Jeff Bezos, Arc XP (https://www.arcxp.com/) is a state-of-the-art digital experience platform engineered to meet the demands of enterprise brands and media and entertainment companies around the world. An integrated ecosystem of cloud-based tools, Arc XP helps create and distribute content, drive digital commerce, and deliver powerful multichannel experiences to both internal and external audiences. Today, Arc XP powers more than 1,400 sites across 23 countries, reaching over 1.5 billion unique monthly visitors.

Built 100% on AWS, the Arc XP platform follows a microservice architecture. All our software teams use devops to deliver and maintain products. Our processes are lightweight, which allows our teams to innovate quickly to bring new ideas to market. New features and products are deployed to our customers every day. The platform is operated by Arc XP as Software as a Service.

We are currently looking for a Sr Software Engineer to join our Revenue Engine team to architect, implement and support new capabilities within Arc XP. You will have the opportunity partner with product owners, engineers and clients to build APIs and platform capabilities for authentication, entitlements, targeting and check out.

Motivation

You stay abreast of back-end technology trends.
You want to be an example to the organization on professional software development practices.
You want to be a mentor and a technical leader.
You have a passion for writing flexible, reusable code.
You have an eye for detail and a passion for quality.
You are obsessed with understanding the big picture and how your work fits.

Responsibilities

Monitor the performance and correctness of our backend services in production using tools like DataDog and Splunk.
Implement and advocate for engineering best practices and use of architectural patterns.
Write high quality code with quality assurance in mind.
Write technical design documents that include alternatives, ideas for iterative delivery, and estimates.
Plan and direct software design projects with other engineers on the team.
Lead knowledge growth on the team via documentation, knowledge sharing and mentoring.
Produce API and usage documentation for internal and external audiences.

Minimum Qualifications

BA/BS in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent practical experience.
4+ years experience building highly-scalable customer facing applications.
Proficient in Java and experienced in at least one other programming language.
Proficient knowledge of multithreading in Java.
Demonstrated experience using one or more RDMSs such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.
Demonstrated experience profiling and performance tuning Java applications, and using monitoring tools for production application monitoring.
Capable of designing, building and testing web services and APIs.
Knowledge of REST, Service Oriented Architecture, OAuth, Basic Authentication and PCI.
Experience designing and implementing CI/CD tooling with an emphasis on building quality code and speed to market.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience building, deploying and supporting applications on AWS.
Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platform applications.
Experience with asynchronous programming.
Experience with Vert.x or Play framework/Akka.
Experience with Elasticsearch or other search capability.
Knowledge of NoSQL, queues, caches.
Familiarity with modern front-end patterns such as single page application frameworks and their interactions with APIs with SDKs.

The Washington Post’s policy for employees is five days per week in the office, with exceptions for newsgathering and general business travel.

Compensation and Benefits

Wherever you are in your life or career, The Washington Post offers comprehensive and inclusive benefits for every step of your journey: