This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Software Engineer, Core Everand based in Canada.
This is a senior technical leadership opportunity focused on shaping the backend platform behind a rapidly evolving digital reading and listening experience. You will define technical direction, design scalable distributed systems, and help connect readers with content through discoverability, personalization, and core consumption services. The role combines hands-on backend engineering with architecture, mentorship, reliability, and cross-functional leadership. You will collaborate closely with Product, Design, Analytics, Web, Mobile, ML, Search, and Recommendations teams to turn ambiguous ideas into robust technical solutions. A major focus will be improving platform health, modernizing legacy systems, reducing technical debt, and strengthening observability and scalability. You will have significant influence over engineering standards and technical strategy while helping other engineers grow and succeed. This remote role is ideal for an experienced backend engineer who cares deeply about users, technical excellence, and building systems that can evolve confidently at scale.
- Set the technical direction for the backend platform, translating ambiguous product goals into clear, scalable backend architectures and implementation strategies.
- Write and socialize technical design documents, lead architecture reviews, and drive alignment around significant engineering decisions.
- Build, evolve, and maintain distributed backend systems supporting web and mobile experiences, discoverability, personalization, experimentation, and core content consumption.
- Own backend reliability and overall platform health, including databases, queues, CI/CD, staging environments, observability, performance, and infrastructure costs.
- Define and improve reliability practices, including service-level objectives, metrics, alerting, telemetry, incident response, and distributed-system debugging.
- Raise engineering standards through thoughtful code reviews, technical mentorship, pairing, knowledge sharing, and strong expectations around design, testing, security, and operations.
- Represent backend engineering in cross-team planning and serve as a technical bridge across Engineering, Product, Design, Analytics, Web, Mobile, and ML teams.
- Modernize legacy systems, reduce technical debt, simplify complexity, and introduce improvements that increase engineering velocity and platform scalability.
- Partner with ML and data-focused teams to build systems that support recommendations, personalization, experimentation, and data-driven product decisions.
- Use metrics, analytics, and telemetry to identify trends, investigate anomalies, and guide technical priorities with clear evidence.
- Champion a user-first approach by ensuring technical decisions contribute meaningfully to better reading and listening experiences.
- Contribute to cross-team architecture groups, design discussions, and initiatives that strengthen engineering practices and technical culture.
Requirements:
- Significant professional experience in backend software engineering, with a strong track record of designing, building, and scaling distributed systems.
- Strong programming skills in at least one modern backend language such as Ruby, Scala, Go, or Python; strong Ruby experience is particularly valuable.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems, backend architecture, reliability engineering, and scalable service design.
- Strong knowledge of observability practices, including SLOs, metrics, alerting, telemetry, and production debugging.
- Proven technical leadership experience, including setting architectural direction, leading major technical initiatives, mentoring engineers, and driving migrations or modernization programs.
- Ability to write clean, maintainable, secure, and scalable production code.
- Strong ability to translate ambiguous requirements into clear technical designs and practical engineering solutions.
- Excellent cross-functional communication skills and confidence collaborating with senior Product, Design, Analytics, ML, Web, and Mobile stakeholders.
- A collaborative mindset focused on achieving the best outcome for the system and the user rather than individual ownership of ideas.
- Passion for mentoring, knowledge sharing, architecture discussions, and raising engineering standards across teams.
- Strong user empathy and an ability to connect technical decisions with measurable improvements to customer experiences.
- Nice to have: Strong coding expertise in Ruby.
- Nice to have: Experience improving reliability, latency, or throughput in large-scale distributed systems.
- Nice to have: Experience partnering with ML teams on recommendation, personalization, or feed systems.
- Nice to have: Familiarity with experimentation, feature-flagging, or progressive delivery platforms.
Benefits:
- Competitive Canadian base salary ranging from approximately CAD $179,000 to CAD $225,000, depending on geographic location, experience, skills, education, and other factors.
- Competitive equity ownership opportunity as part of the overall compensation package.
- Flexible remote work model designed to balance individual flexibility with meaningful opportunities for in-person collaboration.
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage.
- Mental health support and disability coverage.
- Generous paid time off, including vacation, sick time, holidays, winter break, volunteer time, and sabbaticals.
- Paid parental leave and family support benefits.
- Retirement matching and employee equity programs.
- Learning and development programs with opportunities for professional growth.
- Wellness and home-office stipends.
- Complimentary access to the company's suite of digital products.
- Enterprise access to leading AI tools.
- Opportunities to participate in intentional team gatherings and broader company community activities.
- An inclusive environment that values diverse perspectives, collaboration, technical excellence, and continuous learning.