Senior Software Engineer, Backend

About Us

Wag! Group Co. strives to be the number one platform to solve the service, product, and wellness needs of the modern U.S. pet household. Wag! pioneered on-demand dog walking in 2015 with the Wag! app, offering access to 5-star dog walking, sitting, and one-on-one training from a community of over 500,000 Pet Caregivers nationwide. Additionally, Wag! Group Co. operates Petted, one of the nation's largest pet insurance comparison marketplaces; Dog Food Advisor, a leading pet food review platform; WoofWoofTV, reaching over 18 million followers with delightful pet content on social media; and maxbone, a digital platform for modern pet essentials, offering superfoods for dogs and stylish, functional products for today's pet owners. For more information about our company, visit Wag.co. and wagwalking.com

The Role

We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our backend engineering team and help develop products for millions of pets and the humans who love them. This position involves enhancing our core backend API, as well as supporting our cloud infrastructure and associated backend services. We are looking for someone who thrives in a small, fast-paced team environment, and is comfortable working across the stack to solve challenging problems and create exceptional products. We build with AI coding agents every day. Demonstrated experience building both workflows and products with AI tools is a requirement for this role. This role is full-time and in-person 5x a week in our downtown Miami office. Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States at the time of hire. This position is not eligible for current or future employment visa sponsorship.

How You'll Make an Impact

• Take ownership of the backend platform, from the client-facing API schema to the server and database infrastructure in AWS.
• Contribute to architectural and design decisions, and explain the tradeoffs.
• Break down features into releasable components, estimate release schedules, and collaborate with the team.
• Design and implement core products within our PHP and Laravel API, working from an OpenAPI specification in a domain-driven, service and repository architecture.
• Build and enhance internal backend systems in Python, including our AWS Lambda services, and collaborate with other business units.
• Support the production infrastructure by implementing and maintaining AWS services using Terraform, including ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, Parameter Store, CloudWatch, and IAM.
• Participate in production monitoring and incident response, designing the necessary tools and processes.
• Integrate AI-powered solutions directly into the product.
• Build and improve the agent workflows, context, and tooling that let the team develop effectively with AI in a large codebase.

Minimum Paw-lifications

• Significant experience building and operating scalable backend systems in production.

• Demonstrated experience building software with AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex. Be prepared to discuss specifics: features you shipped with agent assistance, the workflows or tooling you built to make agents effective on a large codebase, and where you decided not to rely on them.

• Proficiency in PHP, ideally Laravel, and working proficiency in Python.

• Experience with event-driven and queue-based architectures, particularly AWS SQS.

• Experience running containerized services in production, ideally on ECS.

• Ability to work in-person 5x a week in our downtown Miami office

Purr-furred Paw-lifications

• Familiarity with secrets management in tools such as HashiCorp Vault or AWS Parameter Store.
• Experience with large-scale static analysis and automated refactoring, such as PHPStan, Rector, or similar.
• Proficiency in maintaining and deploying systems with tools such as Terraform, Docker, and GitLab CI/CD.
• Strong knowledge of database design and performance optimization, especially MySQL and Redis.
• Experience integrating LLMs into production software, including prompt design, evaluation, and handling non-deterministic output safely.
• A pragmatic, agnostic coding approach with a strong understanding of when to apply certain design patterns, drawn from extensive experience with large projects.
• Understanding of secure design principles for backend systems.
• Solid understanding of site reliability engineering, monitoring, and incident management.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to work effectively across a distributed team.

Benefits & Purrr-ks

• Competitive Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance
• Complimentary parking on-site at our downtown Miami office
• Catered breakfast and lunch daily
• Monthly Wellness Stipend, and credits for both Wag! and maxbone
• Life Insurance and Short- and Long-term Disability with Guardian
• 401(k) Retirement Plan with Empower and employer match as defined by plan
• 11 company-paid holidays each year
• Flexible (no set limit) discretionary paid time off in accordance with the vacation policy outlined in our handbook and subject to your manager's approval
• Employees are eligible for paid parental leave, up to 8 weeks for non-birthing parents and 14-16 weeks for birthing parents

Wag! Group Co. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.

Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States at the time of hire. This position is not eligible for current or future employment visa sponsorship.

We may use AI-enabled tools to screen and assess applicants against the criteria for this position. This helps our recruiters identify potentially qualified candidates, but it doesn't limit the applications our recruiters may review or consider.