Lead Developer

Rare Days

9d • $130,000 - $160,000 • Remote

About The Position

Rare Days is a multi-disciplinary digital product agency focused on helping creators build lasting legacies. Since 2020, they have specialized in building products at the intersection of content and commerce, empowering creators and businesses to achieve sustainable success. Their clients include renowned creators and organizations like Airbnb, Notion, and Ziff Davis. They focus on community-first platforms, membership tools, and creator infrastructure, emphasizing care, context, and a clear point of view in their work. The team is fully remote and based in Canada, with a preference for candidates able to work within 4 hours of PST.

This role is for a full stack Lead Developer with deep backend expertise, strong command of modern web stacks, and solid front-end experience. The ideal candidate thrives on technical challenges, enjoys building scalable systems, and collaborates effectively with product, design, and client teams. The role involves working independently and in small teams, writing production code, and significantly influencing technical direction.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional engineering experience, including experience operating in a lead or senior technical capacity
• English proficiency
• Produces high-quality, well-tested code and sets the project team's coding standards. Follows DRY, SOLID, and KISS principles.
• Designs decoupled solutions that are easily extendable. Familiar with Hexagonal and Clean Architecture and Domain-Driven Design.
• Reliable on regression discipline. Owns the project's review bar.
• Experience building enterprise-grade systems in production, taking scalability, security, maintainability and performance into account
• Familiarity with AI/LLM integration patterns (prompt engineering, output quality management).
• You can take a vague brief, ask the right clarifying questions to form a strong plan and spec, and deliver a working system without heavy supervision
• Experience with Python and Java, including system architecture and performance optimization, is required. Kotlin experience is a plus.
• Strong knowledge of React, NextJS, and TypeScript
• Backend experience with APIs, databases (SQL/NoSQL), cloud services (AWS, GCP), and distributed systems
• Experience with service-oriented architecture, API gateway patterns, and inter-service communication (GraphQL, gRPC, or similar)
• You communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences and are comfortable leading presentations and deep-dive technical discussions
• You understand how to compromise on business trade-offs and technical decisions
• You're comfortable dealing with uncertainty and are capable of disambiguating complex scope and domains to your team
• You care about people and are motivated to help your team members achieve success on projects

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with AI/LLM orchestration frameworks, RAG, MCP, or agent frameworks, and experience building AI-augmented internal tools
• Experience using Spec-Driven-Development, AI-DLC or similar modern AI-driven software development practices
• Experience building creator platforms, media tools, or community-driven products
• Interest in developer experience, automation, or DevOps tooling

Responsibilities

• Oversee day-to-day engineering work, keeping the team unblocked and aligned on priorities
• Architect scalable enterprise-level backend systems using languages and frameworks such as Python and Java. Experience with Kotlin is a plus.
• Contribute to frontend work using React and TypeScript as needed
• Drive decision-making around performance, scalability, and system design
• Write clean, maintainable code and ensure engineering best practices are followed
• Lead technical documentation, collaborate on sprint planning, and ongoing delivery
• Evaluate, integrate, and maintain AI-powered features and services within production systems
• Help clients and internal teams understand the practical trade-offs, risks, and opportunities when incorporating AI into their products — translating technical complexity into clear, actionable guidance
• Partner with product managers and designers to define and scope solutions
• Lead client-facing conversations around technical strategy and progress
• Present work during demos, milestone check-ins, and roadmap reviews
• Balance business needs with technical feasibility in collaborative planning sessions
• Provide regular feedback and guidance to engineers
• Contribute to hiring, onboarding, and levelling processes, including participating in hiring interviews and regular code reviews
• Help foster a strong, inclusive engineering culture rooted in transparency and accountability
• Identify opportunities to improve our tools, processes, and technical standards

Benefits

• Extended health benefits for Canadian employees
• Flexible working hours
• Remote-friendly culture
• Flexible time-off allowance for vacation, sick days, and personal time as needed

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed