Senior Software Engineer, Backend

We are seeking an experienced and passionate Senior Backend Engineer to join our Product Engineering team. In this role, you will be a key contributor to the architecture, design, and implementation of the foundational services that power our entire e-commerce and wedding planning product suite. You'll work on the services that power our vendor marketplace, wedding registry, planning tools, and other core user experiences, tackling challenges in scalability, performance, and reliability that have a direct impact on our users.

You are a great fit if you are a product-minded engineer who thinks about the end-user and is passionate about building robust, well-designed backend systems. You enjoy collaborating with cross-functional teams, including product managers, designers, and other engineers, to translate complex product requirements into scalable technical solutions.

What You'll Do

• Design & Architect: Lead the design and development of scalable, secure, and maintainable backend microservices and APIs within our service-oriented architecture.
• Build & Implement: Write high-quality, efficient, and testable code, primarily in Java, deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
• Collaborate: Partner closely with product managers, front-end engineers, and other stakeholders to define features and deliver compelling solutions for our couples and vendors.
• Mentor & Uplift: Mentor other engineers through thoughtful code reviews and design discussions, actively contributing to a culture of shared knowledge and growth.
• Own & Operate: Take ownership of the full software development lifecycle, from technical design to deployment, monitoring, and maintenance in a production environment.
• Scale & Optimize: Proactively identify performance bottlenecks and scaling issues, and re-architect systems to ensure they can handle growing traffic and data volumes.
• Innovate: Stay current with emerging technologies and industry trends, particularly within the AI ecosystem, and advocate for their adoption where they can improve our platform and processes.

Who You Are

• Experienced Engineer: You have 5+ years of professional experience in backend software development, with a proven track record of shipping high-quality, scalable products.
• Strong Coder: You possess deep expertise in Java and are proficient with modern development tools, including AI coding assistants (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude Code). Experience with other languages like Scala is a plus.
• System Designer: You have strong experience with distributed systems, microservices architecture, and designing RESTful APIs.
• Database Proficient: You are experienced with both a relational data store such as PostgreSQL and one or more NoSQL data stores (e.g., Redis, MongoDB).
• Cloud Native: You have hands-on experience designing, building, and operating production systems on a major cloud platform, such as AWS.
• Collaborative & Communicative: You have excellent communication skills and can clearly articulate complex technical ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Problem Solver: You are a pragmatic and analytical thinker who is adept at breaking down complex problems and driving them to resolution. A B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or a related field is preferred.

Salary Range

The salary range for this role is $150,000 - $200,000. This full-time role will be hybrid at our office in NYC (Tuesdays & Thursdays).

About Zola

We're Zola, the wedding company that will do anything for love. We're reinventing the wedding planning and registry experience to make the happiest moment in our couples' lives even happier. From engagement to wedding and decorating your first home, Zola is there, combining compassionate customer service with modern tools and technology… all in the service of love.

We built our entire platform from the ground-up in 2013, and quickly became the fastest-growing wedding company in the country. Our team has deep experience creating award-winning online and mobile products that are helpful, intuitive, and simply magical. We're proud to have investor partners including Female Founders Fund, Comcast Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Canvas Ventures, Thrive Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, among others.

We are passionate about supporting all forms of love, and we're proud of our thriving community of over 2 million couples. We strive to hire a team that is as beautifully diverse as the couples getting married today, and we encourage individuals from every race, gender identity, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, marital status, religion and perspective to apply. Zola will always be a place where every employee, couple, wedding guest, wedding vendor, and partner will be respected and accepted and valued.

Our headquarters is in NYC. Come work with us!