Staff Software Engineer - II (KeyCite)

Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada; hybrid workplace

Base compensation: CAD 148,800–198,800 annually in Ontario, with possible annual bonus eligibility.

Company

hirify.global provides trusted content, software, and insights for legal, tax, accounting, compliance, government, and media professionals.

What you will do

• Lead complex engineering initiatives from architecture through production for large-scale, business-critical systems.
• Modernize KeyCite platforms and services using contemporary architectural patterns without disrupting customer-facing products.
• Design distributed services, APIs, event-driven systems, and data-processing capabilities for large volumes of structured and unstructured legal content and metadata.
• Set architecture, quality, reliability, security, observability, deployment, and operational standards across teams.
• Partner with Product, Architecture, and engineering leadership on technical strategy, trade-offs, platform reuse, and measurable business outcomes.
• Mentor senior engineers, lead design reviews, and communicate complex architectural decisions to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience designing and delivering complex production software systems.
• Deep backend and distributed-systems engineering expertise, including APIs, services, event-driven architectures, scalability, performance, reliability, and observability.
• Strong experience with cloud-native architectures, preferably AWS, and with large-scale data processing and data pipelines.
• Experience modernizing complex legacy or long-lived production systems without disrupting existing customers.
• Strong programming skills, ideally in Java and/or Python.
• Experience with automated testing, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, and production monitoring.
• Ability to influence architecture and technical direction beyond one team, independently navigate ambiguous complex problems, and make pragmatic trade-offs.
• Strong communication skills and experience explaining architectural trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising technical standards across teams.

Nice to have

• Experience with high-volume content, publishing, search, information retrieval, metadata, knowledge, graph, or relationship-oriented data platforms.
• Experience building platforms or services consumed by multiple products and engineering teams.
• Experience operating highly available, business-critical systems.
• Exposure to legal technology, professional information, or domains where accuracy, provenance, and reliability are critical.
• Familiarity with AI-enabled applications and their backend and data infrastructure.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible hybrid work model for office-based roles.
• Flexible work arrangements, including working from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year.
• Flexible vacation, two company-wide mental health days, Headspace access, retirement savings, tuition reimbursement, incentive programs, and wellbeing resources.
• Continuous learning and development through Grow My Way programming and skills-first development.
• Two paid volunteer days annually and opportunities for pro-bono consulting and ESG initiatives.
• AI may be used to support recruitment assessment unless the candidate opts out; final consideration includes human review.