Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Grader)

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, Backend (Grader) based in Canada.

This is a high-impact backend engineering role focused on owning the technical foundation of a strategically important product at significant scale. You will lead the development and evolution of backend services and data pipelines that power comprehensive restaurant health assessments. The role combines distributed systems, third-party integrations, asynchronous processing, reliability engineering, and data-intensive workloads. You will have substantial ownership over architecture, platform foundations, observability, and operational excellence as the product expands its capabilities. Working closely with Product-Led Growth and AI engineering teams, you will help evolve the platform toward increasingly AI-powered experiences. This is an opportunity for a senior engineer to shape architecture and establish scalable foundations ahead of significant product expansion.

Accountabilities:
- Own the backend services and data pipelines powering Grader scans end-to-end, from ingesting third-party signals such as Google, Yelp, restaurant menus, and LLM-based GEO signals through to reliably serving results at scale.

- Strengthen the platform ahead of future expansion by reducing latency, improving uptime, and building robust observability, monitoring, and alerting capabilities.

- Design and establish shared abstractions, architectural patterns, operational runbooks, and platform foundations that reduce engineering toil and provide reliable building blocks for other developers.

- Build and operate scalable data pipelines, third-party integrations, and asynchronous processing systems.

- Identify and resolve reliability and operational challenges, helping establish strong engineering practices around incident prevention, monitoring, and system health.

- Partner closely with Product-Led Growth and AI Agents teams to evolve the product into a broader AI-powered solution for restaurant owners.

- Make thoughtful architectural and technical decisions while balancing scalability, performance, reliability, maintainability, and speed of delivery.

- Collaborate effectively across engineering, product, design, and business teams, bringing a strong sense of ownership and proactive problem-solving to the development process.

Requirements

- 7+ years of software engineering experience , including significant experience owning and operating backend services in production.

- Strong experience building and operating data pipelines, third-party integrations, and asynchronous processing systems at scale .

- Demonstrated track record of improving system reliability through observability, alerting, incident reduction, and operational best practices.

- Experience working at a product-focused startup or scale-up , with ownership of systems and services throughout their lifecycle.

- Strong backend development experience, ideally with technologies such as Node.js and TypeScript .

- Experience with databases such as MongoDB and PostgreSQL .

- Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and observability technologies such as AWS, Datadog, and Temporal .

- Strong understanding of scalable backend architecture, distributed systems, data processing, and production operations.

- High degree of ownership, initiative, and accountability, with a proactive approach to identifying and solving technical and operational problems.

- Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively with Product, Design, AI, and business stakeholders.

- A strong team-oriented mindset and ability to build trusted relationships across functions are essential.

Benefits

- Estimated starting base salary of $220,000–$240,000 , depending on level, location, and experience.

- Generous pre-IPO equity package .

- Comprehensive health coverage .

- Work from anywhere within the eligible remote locations.

- 100% remote, remote-first work environment .

- Unlimited paid time off (PTO) .

- Additional company perks and benefits .

- Opportunity to work on high-scale backend systems and contribute to an AI-powered product environment.