Staff Software Engineer, Core Everand

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. Accountabilities: - 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.