Lead Backend Developer

Location: REMOTE / Toronto, Ontario
This job allows you to work remotely.

We are seeking a Lead Backend Developer to join a team responsible for transforming complex customer activity data into actionable business events. This group builds the core intelligence layer that identifies meaningful behavioural patterns and enables automated workflows based on customer interactions and lifecycle milestones.
This is a highly technical leadership position suited for an engineer who enjoys balancing long-term architectural thinking with hands-on software development. You will play a key role in designing and evolving critical platform services while contributing directly through coding, technical design, code reviews, mentoring, and problem-solving.
You will tackle complex distributed systems challenges involving large-scale event processing, stateful decision-making, temporal analysis, event correlation, reliability, observability, and real-time activation workflows.
What You'll Do:
Drive Platform Architecture: Help define and evolve the architecture, service boundaries, and technical direction of systems that transform customer activity data into actionable events and automated workflows.
Lead Through Technical Contribution: Remain deeply involved in implementation by designing solutions, writing production code, reviewing architecture and code, troubleshooting issues, and supporting critical systems.
Build Intelligent Event Processing Systems: Design and develop backend services that analyze customer interactions, identify meaningful patterns over time, and determine when specific business conditions have been met.
Design Stateful Processing Capabilities: Create systems that maintain and evaluate short-term behavioral context, historical activity windows, and event-driven state transitions.
Develop Extensible Rules & Decision Frameworks: Build scalable, configurable frameworks that allow new event-driven business logic and automation rules to be created and maintained efficiently.
Mentor and Support Engineers: Provide technical leadership through coaching, design reviews, architecture guidance, and active collaboration with engineers across the organization.
Translate Strategy into Execution: Work closely with Product and Engineering leadership to convert business objectives into practical technical roadmaps and incremental delivery plans.
Collaborate Across Teams: Partner with platform, infrastructure, and application teams to ensure seamless integration between event processing systems and downstream services.
Champion Reliability and Operational Excellence: Build highly observable and resilient systems using monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, incident management, and continuous improvement practices.
Influence Technical Direction: Participate in broader architectural discussions and help establish engineering standards, patterns, and best practices across the organization.
Why Consider This Opportunity?
- Lead the development of business-critical backend systems operating at significant scale.
- Work on technically challenging distributed systems and real-time data processing problems.
- Influence architecture and technical strategy across a growing platform.
- Collaborate with a highly experienced engineering team tackling complex engineering challenges.
- Join a company investing heavily in platform innovation, automation, and intelligent decision-making systems.

Must Have Skills:
What You'll Bring:
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating backend or platform services in production environments.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including system design, automated testing, source control management, peer code reviews, and CI/CD best practices.
- Professional experience building backend applications and services using modern programming languages such as Python, Ruby, or similar technologies (our environment primarily utilizes Python and Elixir).
- Exposure to functional programming concepts and patterns, with experience applying them in production systems (experience with Elixir is considered an asset).
- Solid understanding of API design, development, and integration, including REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and related service communication technologies.
- Hands-on experience deploying and operating applications within a major cloud platform such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
- Experience working with distributed systems and microservice-based architectures, leveraging technologies such as Kubernetes, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or comparable platforms.
- Strong database experience across both transactional (OLTP) and analytical (OLAP) environments, including data modeling, schema design, query optimization, and performance tuning.
- Strong experience designing and scaling distributed, event-driven, or high-throughput systems.
- Demonstrated architectural expertise in stateful services, asynchronous processing, real-time decisioning, and system reliability.
- Proven technical leadership experience, including mentoring engineers and leading complex initiatives from design through delivery.
- Ability to navigate ambiguity and convert business requirements into pragmatic technical solutions.
- Experience working with large-scale event processing platforms, streaming systems, workflow engines, analytics platforms, or rule-based decision systems.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts, including retries, duplicate events, ordering, late-arriving data, idempotency, fault tolerance, multi-tenancy, and consistency tradeoffs.
- Experience building cloud-native applications and services within modern cloud environments.
- Strong operational mindset with experience supporting production systems through monitoring, alerting, incident response, and continuous improvement practices.
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- A pragmatic, customer-focused approach that balances engineering excellence with business impact and delivery objectives.