Being a Backend engineer at Wix

Joining the Backend Engineering guild at Wix makes you a part of a community of all server developers at the company. We’re a group of over 400 talented developers, sharing a mission to shape the architecture of Wix's 3,000+ backend microservices and ensure a low-latency, high-availability environment that supports the services for 200M+ users worldwide.

The guild is your professional hub, the place where you meet other backend developers and share knowledge. Guilds at Wix are responsible to maintain the professional quality across the entire company, provide guidelines to ensure product quality, and promote professional development.

We asked our backend guild managers to share from their perspectives about the challenges we’re helping solve, about their growth, and the role the guild plays in server developer’s life at Wix.

First, what are we here to do?

There are various groups and roles that backend developers at Wix can take. Some are part of product teams, while others are part of the core teams and are solving infrastructure challenges.

All of us, no matter where we’re located, solve complex engineering challenges at scale. Just to give an idea of the scales we’re talking about, Wix runs more than 8% of the internet(!).

Our services cater to hundreds of millions of users around the world, making a real impact on their businesses and allowing them to realize their dreams and become successful online. There are over 1B internet users who reach Wix every month - whether it’s our users’ websites, mobile apps, or other applications. We handle over 500B HTTP requests every day and produce around 66B daily business events. To support all that, we use 19 globally distributed datacenters in multi-cloud environments and more than 3,000 micro-service clusters.

Working at this scale requires creative and innovative solutions. To name some of the challenges we’re solving -

• Creating high scale, distributed low latency solutions in a complex micro service environment

• Creating the highest quality of products that enable deploying hundreds of deployments a day with confidence (without breaking production!)

• Keeping performance penalty to a millisecond(s) minimum

• Designing open platform systems, allowing us to extend and customize our logic by any user or 3rd party provider

What it means to be part of the Server guild at Wix

Our guild is an active community of engineers for engineers. This is a great place for knowledge sharing, networking, and learning (but let’s be honest, fun is also high in our value list ;)).

First, the guild makes time for you to work on projects outside your day-to-day tasks. This means that around 20% of your time will be dedicated to learning and acquiring new skills.

Every week, you’ll take part in our Guild days, where you’ll meet other developers at Wix to share knowledge, stay up to date with new technologies and processes, and build a professional network to help you grow via tech talks, workshops, and group exercise.

Every quarter you’ll attend a Guild week. In this week you’ll be going out of your team and the day-to-day work, to spend a whole week doing different tasks of your choice. You can join another product team, contribute to an open source project or our internal infrastructure, research tasks or prepare an educational session for your peers. This week lets you experience and acquire different types of skills on a variety of topics.

How can people grow in this role?

We see professional growth as an ever continuing journey in which you deepen your knowledge, expertise, and experience. You can grow, get more exposure, and cross Wix impact by taking a role in the vast guild's initiatives and activities.

One example of growth is becoming a guild expert. This is someone who shares knowledge and expertise via consulting, code reviews, or design reviews and gets exposed to server developers and challenges outside their own group.

You can also work to become a guild master and be a focal point within your group for any expertise, such as infra/system knowledge/design/code quality.

And finally, the guild is an amazing springboard for mobility within the company, meaning that after excelling for a period of time in your role, you can move to other positions in other parts & professions of Wix.

Cool things to know about us

People joining our guild are often surprised by our unique investment in onboarding. When you join, you’ll start with a 2 week self-driven course, where you’ll build your first service and deploy it into production in your 2nd week! Then you’ll learn about our different infrastructures, CI/CD systems, and platformization & TDD guidelines. Next, you’ll go through a 2 week crash course where you get to meet and hear focal points from the guild, get an in depth overview of our infra and guidelines, and get to connect with other peers. And then, you’ll get to work :)

We work with a wide range of technologies and tech stacks, including Scala, Node, Kafka, MySQL, Mongo DB, Elastic Search, Grafana, K8S, and more.

We provide ourselves with our open atmosphere. There are no barriers or walls for knowledge sharing: anyone can ask anything and get answers and help from everyone - we’re all for 1 and 1 for all, and always looking to learn together.

To explore all Backend guild roles at Wix, click here.