Engineering Manager H/F REMOTE FLEXIBLE

Blue J builds the most advanced tax research technology in the world. Our customers are tax professionals who rely on us to deliver fast, accurate insights that help them serve their clients with confidence. Our engineering team is known for building high quality systems, moving fast through lean practices, and shipping multiple times per day with confidence. We value thoughtful system design, strong software fundamentals, and a culture of collaboration and continuous learning.
We recently raised a significant funding round to accelerate product and platform development, and we are expanding our engineering leadership team to support this growth.

This is a remote role requiring candidates to be within driving distance of Toronto for in person meetings 1 to 2 times per quarter. We are looking for a Director of Engineering that will guide the evolution of Blue J’s platform architecture and help our engineering teams deliver high quality products at speed. This role is ideal for someone who is a strong system designer, deeply experienced with SaaS platforms, and energized by helping teams navigate technical complexity.
You will work closely with product, engineering, and research to define platform direction, build reliable and scalable systems, and ensure our teams have the tools and infrastructure they need to ship confidently and frequently. This leader will coach senior engineers, help untangle difficult architectural challenges, jump into code and designs when needed, and grow a platform team made up of strong SDII and senior engineers.

Collaborating with product and engineering leaders to define platform goals and priorities
Owning the long term vision for platform capabilities that support reliability, scalability, developer experience, and speed of delivery
Identifying focus areas to improve architecture, infrastructure, system performance, and cross team technical alignment

Enabling High Quality Delivery

Helping engineers make architectural tradeoffs that balance speed with long term maintainability
Ensuring projects stay on track and are communicated clearly to stakeholders
Supporting teams in shipping frequently, safely, and with high confidence, consistent with Blue J’s engineering culture

Strengthening the Engineering Organization

Coaching and developing engineers into strong system thinkers and leaders
Improving engineering practices that support quality, lean iteration, strong testing, and healthy system design
10+ years of hands-on experience designing and building distributed backend systems, including service-oriented and event-driven architectures.

• 5+ years leading software engineering or data platform teams with demonstrated success growing and developing high-performing groups.
• Strong architectural foundation with experience owning complex systems end-to-end; including roadmap creation, system design, implementation, and long-term evolution.
• Experience with data ingestion, transformation, and indexing pipelines, ideally involving streaming architectures or retrieval workflows.
• Ability to design and reason about scalable distributed systems, including performance, reliability, consistency, and cost tradeoffs.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a senior/staff-level IC when needed, especially during early context-building.
• Track record of identifying critical issues, setting clear goals, and shaping the technical strategy for engineering organizations.
• Experience aligning engineering, product, design, and legal research around shared outcomes and coordinated execution.
• Clear communication skills with the ability to explain complex system designs to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience guiding teams through architectural decisions, refactors, and long-term platform modernization.
• Bonus experience with RAG pipelines, embeddings workflows, or large-scale data systems.

Experience designing or scaling data ingestion, transformation, or indexing pipelines, especially those supporting search or retrieval workloads.
Familiarity with RAG-oriented data workflows, including document processing, embeddings pipelines, and near-real-time indexing strategies.
Background in building or operating data platforms handling large volumes of structured or unstructured data.
Prior work modernizing legacy systems or driving platform-level architectural evolutions across multiple teams.

Node.js, TypeScript, Python
AWS, Terraform
PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, DynamoDB, S3
A meaningful leadership role shaping the platform foundation of a fast growing company
A flexible hybrid environment with the option to work remotely most of the time
Competitive salary and equity compensation
A culture where quality, lean iteration, and thoughtful system design are core engineering principles
We are customer focused
Chat with our Talent Acquisition Manager
Meet our VP of Engineering
Technical deep dive with an engineering team member
Leadership interview with our VP of Engineering
We believe our strength is built on diversity of thought, and encourage candidates from all backgrounds and experiences to apply. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

To ensure transparency, we want candidates to know that Blue J uses AI-enabled tools within our applicant tracking system to help organize applications and highlight profiles that match the key requirements for each role.
We use these tools to support efficiency and consistency, not to replace human judgment and we’re committed to a fair, thoughtful, and equitable experience for every candidate