Senior Backend Engineer

Join a Challenger

Being a traditional bank just isn’t our thing, so we challenge ourselves to get creative in providing innovative banking solutions for Canadians.

How do we get there? With a talented team of inquisitive and agile challengers that break through the status quo. So, if you’re passionate about redefining the future of banking—while having fun—this could be your next big opportunity.

Our company continues to grow, and today we serve more than 800,000 customers across Canada through Equitable Bank, Canada's Challenger Bank™, and have been around for more than 50 years. Equitable Bank's wholly-owned subsidiary, Concentra Bank, supports credit unions across Canada that serve more than six million members. Together we have over $142 billion in combined assets under management and administration, with a clear mandate to drive change in Canadian banking to enrich people's lives. Our customers have named our EQ Bank digital platform ( eqbank.ca ) one of the top banks in Canada on the Forbes World's Best Banks list since 2021. 

CARE Pod sits on the critical path for how customers get help and how internal teams resolve operational workflows. We own customer-facing support experiences (chat + contact center integrations), enablement tooling, and a growing portfolio of agentic workflows that accelerate investigations and back-office execution.  

We are hiring a Senior backend engineer to  build and productionize agentic systems that are safe, observable, and auditable while strengthening service boundaries and lifecycle correctness across vendor and internal platforms.  

The focus is to move toward:  

• Clearer service ownership and deterministic lifecycle behavior across systems


• Well-defined, testable contracts between internal services and vendors 


• Observable and explainable runtime behavior for AI workflows and integrations 


• Repeatable evaluation and regression gating for non-deterministic agent outputs


• Predictable and low-risk releases aligned to our release governance model 

What You Will Work On

You will design and implement backend services and agentic workflows that:  

• Implement agentic task flows (tool use, orchestration, and workflow state) for back-office automation where the final decision remains human-owned 


• Build evaluation harnesses (runners, suites, regression gates) to validate correctness boundaries for non-deterministic systems 


• Strengthen cross-system lifecycle guarantees (handoff, session, termination, retries) using backend events/APIs rather than fragile UI triggers 


• Build/maintain knowledge ingestion pipelines that transform content into searchable indexes and support freshness + traceability


• Implement production-grade observability (signals, traces, failure classification) so AI outcomes and integrations are explainable in incidents


• Contribute to release readiness via trunk-based discipline, tagging, and evidence-driven release workflows 

You will own services end to end:  

• Service design, API contracts, and workflow state modell


• Test strategy (unit/integration/e2e) and evaluation suites for AI flows 


• Deployment and production support, including after-hours readiness in partnership with central teams 

What You Bring

• Strong backend engineering fundamentals (service design, distributed systems, async workflows). 


• Experience designing systems where correctness is enforced through contracts, tests, and runtime guarantees rather than tribal knowledge.


• Practical experience with at least one of: agent orchestration, workflow engines, tool-calling systems, or evaluation frameworks for LLM/agent behavior.


• Ability to reason about failure modes across system boundaries (vendor + internal) and build deterministic lifecycle handling.


• Production mindset: observability, incident response, and operational readiness. 
  Comfort operating under data privacy constraints and consent-based integrations. 

#INDE

What we offer [For full-time permanent roles]

Competitive discretionary bonus 

✨ Market leading RRSP match program

Medical, dental, vision, life, and disability benefits

Employee Share Purchase Plan

Maternity/Parental top-up while you care for your little one

Generous vacation policy and personal days 

Virtual events to connect with your fellow colleagues

Professional development and comprehensive Career Development program

A fulfilling opportunity to join one of the top FinTechs and help create a new kind of banking experience

The incumbent will be working hybrid and in office time will be spent working from Equitable Bank’s additional office space located at 2200-25 Ontario Street, Toronto, ON .

Equitable Bank is deeply committed to inclusion. Our organization is stronger and our employees thrive when we honour and celebrate everyone’s diverse experiences and perspectives. In tandem with that commitment, we support and encourage our staff to grow not just in their career path, but personally as well. 

We commit to providing a barrier-free recruitment process and work environment for all applicants. Please let us know of any accommodations needed so that you can bring your best self to the application process and beyond. All candidates considered for hire must successfully pass a criminal background check and credit check to qualify for hire. While we appreciate your interest in applying, an Equitable recruiter will only contact leading candidates whose skills and qualifications closely match the requirements of the position.

We can’t wait to get to know you!