Senior Backend Developer (Distributed Systems)

Location: Toronto, Canada

Salary: CAD 143,000–200,000 per year, plus potential bonus and benefits.

Company

hirify.global provides content personalization through data-activated content generation and AI decisioning for global brands.

What you will do

• Lead the architectural evolution of the recommendations pipeline into a modern distributed architecture while maintaining production stability.
• Design, build, and operate scalable, fault-tolerant backend services for personalization, content selection, send-time optimization, subject line personalization, and frequency capping.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, reliability risks, and scaling limitations.
• Collaborate with ML engineers and product stakeholders to turn requirements into production-ready technical designs.
• Own system components from architecture and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and incident response.
• Mentor engineers and promote strong practices in system design, testing, observability, and operational excellence.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience focused on distributed systems.
• Experience building and operating large-scale, fault-tolerant, highly available, and highly concurrent systems.
• Strong Python and software engineering skills, including system design, unit testing, Git, code review, and CI/CD.
• Understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including consensus, partitioning, replication, back-pressure, idempotency, and failure handling.
• Experience with cloud platforms and modern distributed technologies such as Kubernetes, Kafka, gRPC, Docker, and GitHub Actions.
• Strong technical leadership, problem-solving, collaboration, and mentoring skills.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with Apache Spark, Apache Flink, or Apache Beam, especially Spark.

Culture & Benefits

• Medical, financial, and other employee benefits.
• Focus on technical rigor, ownership, continuous improvement, and inclusive collaboration.
• Equal opportunity employment across diverse backgrounds and protected characteristics.