Senior Engineering Manager of Backend Services

Description

Whisker is redefining what it means to live with cats—designing intelligent systems that remove friction, elevate the everyday, and celebrate the quiet brilliance of feline companionship. Today, Litter-Robot leads the category. Tomorrow, an entire ecosystem that expands what’s possible for cats and the people who love them. We believe the future is feline. And we’re imagining that future today.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, and/or equivalent years of experience
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years directly managing engineers with ownership of hiring, performance, and career development
• Demonstrated success leading backend service teams at consumer scale with distributed services and APIs supporting a large installed base of application users or devices
• Expertise in API design and service architecture, including versioning and backward compatibility for clients that cannot all be upgraded at once
• Experience with high-volume data ingestion and event-driven architecture (Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalent), including the pipelines that feed analytics and machine learning
• A track record of driving measurable reliability improvement — fewer or less severe incidents, improved uptime, a healthier on-call practice, or materially more stable deployments
• Experience leading distributed teams across multiple time zones, including blended teams of full-time employees and contractors or outsourced partners
• Proven ability to recruit, level, and develop engineers, including promoting individual contributors into senior and lead roles
• Current technical credibility: able to review code, lead architecture discussions, and prototype solutions independently
• Experience managing the firmware-to-cloud boundary and hardware-dependent release trains, including field failure analysis
• Familiarity with platform engineering practice such as infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, containerization or serverless deployment models, and observability tooling sufficient to set direction and hold quality standards
• Experience with AWS infrastructure and the ability to own cloud architecture, cost, and capacity decisions for the services their team runs
• Experience transitioning a contractor-heavy team toward a stronger full-time core without disrupting delivery
• Experience in a direct-to-consumer or subscription business
• Prior Director of Engineering experience is welcome — this role owns a broad scope across several service domains

Benefits

• Premium Medical/Dental/Vision insurance
• Paid parental leave
• Whisker Parents Program
• 1 day "pawternity" leave for new pet adoption
• Pet Insurance Discount
• 401K match
• Flexible spending accounts
• Company-paid short-term disability and life insurance
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Generous paid time off
• 14 Paid Holidays
• Top of the line equipment
• Pet-friendly office
• Whisker products and swag
• Continuing education Support
• On-site gym with Peloton
• Referral program