Staff Software Engineer, Foundations

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, Foundations based in Canada.

This is a high-impact staff-level engineering role focused on re-platforming the data layer behind a mission-critical compliance product.
You will lead a complex migration from a Mongo-centric architecture to a schema-aware, Postgres-backed platform while maintaining customer-facing API compatibility.
The role operates at significant scale, processing high-throughput security and compliance data across distributed systems.
You will tackle challenging problems involving data correctness, eventual consistency, multi-tenancy, reliability, and large-scale migrations.
Working across teams, you will shape architectural direction for streaming, storage, caching, and data-querying infrastructure.
You will also mentor senior engineers and influence multi-quarter technical strategy across the broader engineering organization.
This is an opportunity to make foundational technical decisions in a remote, collaborative environment where reliability and correctness are essential.

• Lead the migration of the resource data model from a Mongo-centric architecture to a schema-aware, Postgres-backed platform while maintaining backward compatibility and customer integrations.
• Design and evolve high-throughput data ingestion and processing pipelines capable of handling terabyte-scale data streams and significant bursts of activity.
• Architect systems for correctness under eventual consistency, using approaches such as idempotent processing, conditional writes, reconciliation, and explicit backpressure.
• Drive technical solutions across engineering teams that depend on the Foundations platform, influencing systems and decisions beyond your immediate team.
• Develop the Query API into a production-grade platform with schema versioning, joins, exports, tenant isolation, and predictable performance under load.
• Build and operate data infrastructure where accuracy and reliability are critical because generated evidence must withstand external compliance audits.
• Diagnose complex production issues involving hot partitions, unbounded fan-out, online database rewrites, continuously written tables, and challenging production data shapes.
• Set architectural direction across Kafka and event-queuing infrastructure, Redis caching, Postgres, MongoDB, and related distributed-system components.
• Establish and execute multi-quarter technical roadmaps in partnership with engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Champion reliability, observability, operational excellence, and strong engineering practices across foundational data infrastructure.
• Mentor senior engineers through design reviews, architectural guidance, technical coaching, and hands-on collaboration on complex engineering problems.
• Use AI tools responsibly to accelerate engineering workflows and explore opportunities to improve the systems and processes being built.

Requirements:

• Proven experience leading major platform migrations or v1-to-v2 architectural transitions while maintaining backward compatibility, availability, and customer-facing functionality.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems and data pipeline engineering, with experience designing and operating enterprise-scale systems handling high-throughput event processing and terabyte-scale data.
• Strong knowledge of Kafka or comparable streaming and queuing technologies, including partitioning, consumer groups, redelivery, ordering considerations, and idempotency.
• Extensive experience with relational and document databases at scale, particularly Postgres and MongoDB, including query planning, connection pooling, data modeling, and online schema changes.
• Strong understanding of eventual consistency, multi-tenancy, distributed data processing, reconciliation, and reliability engineering.
• Solid AWS fundamentals and professional experience working with TypeScript and Node.js.
• Experience defining technical strategy and multi-quarter roadmaps while collaborating effectively with engineering leadership and teams outside your direct ownership.
• Ability to communicate complex architectural concepts, system tradeoffs, and long-term technical decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers and raise engineering standards through technical leadership, design reviews, and hands-on contribution.
• Strong operational mindset with a focus on observability, reliability, performance, and maintainability.
• Curiosity and willingness to use AI tools to amplify engineering capabilities, while applying sound judgment and responsible practices.

Benefits:

• Competitive salary and equity.
• 100% company-covered medical, dental, and vision benefits, including dependent coverage.
• Pension contribution.
• 16 weeks of paid parental leave for all new parents.
• Health and wellness stipend.
• Remote workspace, internet, and cellphone stipends.
• Flexible working hours and location.
• 21 days of vacation time and 80 hours of sick leave.
• 11 company-paid holidays.
• Virtual team-building activities, lunch-and-learns, and company-wide events.
• Inclusive, remote-first working environment with opportunities to collaborate with colleagues internationally.