An open talk with backend developers at Wix

Before we dive in, how do you usually start off your day?

Nir: My day begins with reviewing CVs, because it's crucial to advance good candidates early on. In our field, the best candidates are quickly snatched. After that, I hold a daily stand-up with my team to discuss what was done yesterday and what will be done today.

Tal: There is one hour early in the day, that is my quiet hour for coding. After that, my day is full of meetings until 4 or 5 PM.

Shay: There are days focused primarily on planning, and there are others that are all about hands-on coding.

Gabi: I start my morning by checking emails, going through Slack and having a coffee. Then, I take a deep breath and dive in :)

Nir Orman, E-commerce Enterprise R&D Manager

What’s the most important thing to know about Backend engineers at Wix?

Ittay: Wix is an engineering culture company, and it's really reflected in every aspect of the day-to-day work. Every decision we make is based on numbers, the mindset of being effective for our users and enabling our users to base their business on our system. This drives us to become more and more professional, which affects many users' day-to-day lives.

Nir: The Wix Server Guild is probably the best school there is for Backend engineers in terms of scale, infrastructure and engineering best practices. That’s where the best engineers in the industry come to grow. In the end, you're entering an organization that is a school that will teach you everything you need to know to create things that didn't exist before.

Ittay Mizrahi, R&D Group Manager at Premium

Tell us a little about the tough bits of the job.

Nir: One of the main challenges Backend engineers face at Wix is writing APIs so that developers find them easy and convenient to use. We treat APIs as products in their own right, especially since we see Wix as an open platform. Also, the architecture of backend systems serving 240 million users is definitely challenging.

Shay: The scale makes it different than anything you can imagine. I remember that during my interview, the hiring manager said: "You can't Google solutions for Wix's unique backend challenges". Pushing you to innovate for vast numbers of users is an enormous challenge.

Gabby: Performance optimization. With our massive scale, we constantly work on improving our product's performance, including website loading times, API calls and site rendering. Our team is at the heart of this effort, understanding Wix's complex system as a whole and how to make it perform better at the backend level.

Ittay: I was a 100% Microsoft-oriented specialist before coming to Wix, and I had to learn everything from the operating system (Linux) to databases (MySQL) and programming languages (Java/Scala).

Shay Sofer, Backend Developer at DevEx

What is the one most substantial thing that you learned during your time at Wix?

Nir: I think the topic of API design is something you encounter for the first time only in a company the size of Wix. You can’t simply coordinate the interface with the front end developer sitting in the next table, you have to think about wider use cases. I didn't know, for example, what Protobuf or GRPC were.

Gabby: Until Wix, I had never worked on the JVM. Since we work here on Scala, everything runs on the JVM.

Tal: I wrote in various languages before, but part of my onboarding at Wix was learning Scala. They gave me the time to learn it. It's a language that enables incredible capabilities. The same goes for Grafana, a tool I wasn't familiar with before coming to Wix.

Shay: Never cut corners, as it will have an impact on your users. Design your service with failure in mind since everything can, and will, fail.

Gabi Kahlon, Server Team Lead at Core Server

What was a shocker for you when you just started working for Wix?

Gabby: The people. The talent here is extraordinary compared to the industry outside. It’s not only the professionalism. There's also a pleasant culture here, so you come to work with a smile and even go out for beers together, which I think is the best testimony to a good social fabric.

Nir: I was shocked to find that at Wix, there is no Staging environment - the code is deployed directly to production. At first I thought it was madness. I was sure it would break production. Now, I understand it's a great way to develop rapidly. We use feature toggles and Test Driven Development - and it works!

Tal David, Premium Server Team Lead at Platform