Lead Backend Developer (Distributed Systems)

Location: Remote, with the role listed in Toronto, Canada

Base pay: CAD 147,300–192,000/year, with potential additional bonus and benefits.

Company

hirify.global develops content personalization through data-activated content generation and AI decisioning for global marketing teams.

What you will do

• Set the technical direction and lead architecture, design, and implementation of the Orchestration platform from prototype to production.
• Design and build scalable, event-driven, fault-tolerant distributed systems for high-volume, real-time messaging decisions across workflows and channels.
• Own key components end to end, including deployment, monitoring, incident response, and operational reliability.
• Lead design reviews, resolve architectural tradeoffs, and maintain standards for system design, code quality, testing, and operational rigor.
• Partner with Product, Machine Learning, Data Platform, and adjacent engineering teams to turn complex requirements into production-ready technical designs.
• Mentor engineers, drive observability and incident response practices, and share on-call responsibility for business-critical services.

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience focused on distributed systems.
• Deep experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, fault-tolerant, highly available, and highly concurrent distributed systems.
• Strong systems thinking and architectural judgment for event-driven, stateful, real-time decisioning systems, including consensus, partitioning, replication, back-pressure, idempotency, and failure handling.
• Experience building and operating backend services in a modern cloud environment, including Google Cloud Platform and Kubernetes.
• Hands-on experience with microservice and service-oriented architectures and synchronous, event-sourced, orchestrated, and asynchronous communication patterns, including gRPC and Kafka.
• Strong foundation in Python.
• Exemplary engineering practices covering system design, code review, testing, and CI/CD.
• Strong operational excellence, technical leadership, architectural decision-making, design reviews, mentoring, observability, incident response, and healthy on-call practices.
• Exceptional problem-solving and communication skills, including translating technical tradeoffs into practical decisions with product and engineering stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Experience with Elixir; experience with Erlang, Scala/Akka, Go, or Clojure is also relevant.
• Experience with workflow orchestration systems such as Prefect, Airflow, Dagster, or Temporal.
• Experience building, operating, or integrating with ML-driven decisioning or scoring systems.

Culture & Benefits

• High-ownership technical role with executive visibility and responsibility for a strategic engineering investment.
• Collaboration across Product, Machine Learning, Data Platform, and engineering teams.
• Remote work arrangement with shared on-call responsibilities for business-critical services.
• Medical, financial, and other benefits, plus potential additional bonus.
• Commitment to an inclusive, diverse, and equal-opportunity workplace.