Staff Backend Engineer, Architecture Engineering: Nonlinear Productivity

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Backend Engineer, Architecture Engineering: Nonlinear Productivity based in Canada. This is a senior technical leadership role focused on building new systems that fundamentally improve software development productivity. You’ll serve as a technical anchor for a greenfield team exploring agentic engineering solutions and new approaches to developer workflows. The role combines backend engineering, distributed systems expertise, AI/LLM-based system design, and product-oriented problem solving. You’ll take ambiguous challenges from initial discovery through architecture, implementation, measurement, and production deployment. Your work will influence how engineers review code, manage releases, and navigate friction throughout the software development lifecycle. You’ll operate across a broad codebase, mentor experienced engineers, shape technical direction, and collaborate with distributed teams and senior stakeholders. The environment emphasizes autonomy, experimentation, AI-assisted development, and the opportunity to establish technical foundations for an emerging product area. Accountabilities: - Set the technical direction for agentic systems, including agent orchestration, tool usage, guardrails, recovery strategies, and decisions about where human involvement remains essential. - Identify and prioritize sources of friction across the software development lifecycle and determine whether the most effective solution is technical, process-based, agentic, or a combination. - Lead initiatives from early hypotheses and discovery through concrete technical proposals, implementation, production deployment, and measurement of results. - Work across different areas of a large codebase as required by the problem, operating effectively as a generalist rather than within a narrowly defined service boundary.

- Apply distributed systems expertise to identify concurrency issues, scaling limitations, consistency challenges, deployment differences, and failure modes in AI-generated or agent-driven solutions. - Establish evaluation approaches that distinguish plausible-looking results from solutions that are genuinely correct, reliable, and production-ready. - Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, technical discussions, pairing, and practical guidance on agent engineering and distributed systems. - Collaborate regularly with distributed engineering teams to align on roadmaps, tooling, architecture, and technical priorities. - Communicate technical progress, decisions, and outcomes to senior stakeholders and partner teams. - Help maintain a high technical bar during hiring and participate in technical leadership assessments for Staff-level engineering candidates. - Build and evolve a greenfield technical foundation, expanding the scope and impact of the team as its systems and initiatives mature. Requirements: - Significant professional software engineering experience, with the ability to operate at Staff level and provide technical leadership across complex initiatives. - Demonstrated experience building reliable agentic or large language model (LLM)-based systems, including multi-step orchestration, tool use, guardrails, recovery mechanisms, or related production capabilities. - Strong distributed systems and computer science fundamentals, including coordination, consistency, idempotency, rate limiting, failure handling, and behavior under load. - Strong proficiency in at least one of Go, Rust, or Python, with the ability to read and modify code in the other languages. - Proven ability to work autonomously within unfamiliar codebases and move initiatives from discovery through implementation and completion.