Senior Software Developer

Nanometrics Inc•Ottawa, ON

5d•CA$115,000 - CA$140,000•Hybrid

About The Position

We are looking for a visionary senior software engineer of the future to lead the design and construction of our next-generation platform. Your mission is to build a system capable of ingesting, processing, and analyzing massive volumes of real-time data using AI systems from seismic sensors deployed across the planet. In this role, you will define the system architecture and foundational stack for a scalable and highly modular platform. Your architecture will directly power global seismological research and enable early warning capabilities that protect critical infrastructure worldwide.

Requirements

Architectural Vision & Decisiveness: Ability to see beyond current paradigms and design systems that will scale for the next decade. Capable of making and defending tough architectural trade-offs regarding latency, consistency, availability, and cost.
Innovation with Purpose: A relentless drive to explore emerging technologies (like agentic frameworks or edge processing) anchored firmly to business outcomes. You possess the maturity to know when to innovate to drive SaaS revenue, and when to rely on battle-tested, standard technology for mission-critical paths.
Strategic Communication: You thrive in a highly collaborative environment, acting as a trusted technical advisor to R&D leadership. You have the confidence to debate complex trade-offs and constructively challenge assumptions, coupled with the dedication to deeply refine, document, and execute on architectures. You possess an exceptional ability to translate complex distributed systems concepts into clear, actionable blueprints for the engineering team.
AI-Assisted Practice: You work alongside AI collaborators (Claude, Gemini, and others) as part of your daily craft, using them to accelerate design exploration, code review, documentation, and prototyping. You have expert-level judgment about where AI accelerates the work and where it doesn't.
Technical Authority & Mentorship: A natural leader who elevates the entire engineering department through rigorous design documents, deep technical code reviews, and a commitment to continuous improvement.
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field
Architecture & Distributed Systems: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3+ years serving as a Senior Engineer or Software Architect, including time spent hands-on in production codebases. Deep expertise in designing cost-effective, large-scale, high-throughput distributed systems and transitioning complex monolithic applications into modular, event-driven architectures.
Platform Extensibility & API Design: Proven track record of designing versatile plugin architectures, dynamic module frameworks, and clear system perimeters. Deep understanding of API contract design and modern UI architecture (such as Micro-Frontends patterns) to enable interface extensibility without requiring hands-on UI implementation.
AI & Machine Learning Infrastructure: Practical experience designing the scaffolding required to serve AI models and agentic workflows at scale. Strong understanding of MLOps pipelines (e.g., MLFlow, KubeFlow, Kedro), low-latency model inference, agent orchestrators, RAG and MCP.
High-Throughput Data & IoT Messaging: Deep expertise with distributed event-streaming platforms (e.g., Apache Kafka, AWS Kinesis, Apache Flink) and a strong understanding of IoT data ingestion patterns and protocols (e.g., SEED, MQTT, gRPC, WebSockets) for real-time sensor networks.
Advanced Database Topologies: Extensive knowledge in evaluating and designing complex data models across diverse storage paradigms, specifically Time-Series Databases (e.g., InfluxDB, TimescaleDB) for high-frequency sensor data, alongside relational and NoSQL systems.
Cloud-Native Infrastructure: Strong command of designing fault-tolerant, elastic cloud architectures. Deep experience with AWS, container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker), and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) to ensure global availability and security.
Backend Engineering: Expert-level proficiency in high-performance backend languages and frameworks (e.g., modern Java ecosystems like Quarkus or Spring Boot).

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with scientific data processing, geophysics, or seismology.
Experience designing cloud-native architectures that adhere to rigorous security frameworks and compliance standards, such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001.
Experience deploying lightweight processing engines or machine learning models directly onto constrained remote IoT devices.
Hands-on experience with advanced data routing, transformation, and ETL frameworks (e.g., Apache NiFi, Apache Airflow) to orchestrate and monitor complex data flows across the platform.
Deep familiarity with Python data science ecosystems to facilitate seamless collaboration with the ML and AI modeling teams.
Practical experience managing the Maven/Terraform ecosystem and designing robust CI/CD pipelines to ensure automated, high-quality software delivery across the infrastructure.
Familiarity with advanced query languages like GraphQL or building unified API gateways for federated services.

Responsibilities

Build the Platform: Design and build a scalable, event-driven IoT platform that ingests, processes, and stores massive streams of high-frequency seismic data with ultra-low latency. Define clear system boundaries, rigorous APIs, and a modular framework that enables seamless addition of new data feeds, AI-driven services, and interface elements.
Design for AI as a First-Class Workload: Build the platform to natively support AI and ML workflows, model serving, agentic systems, RAG pipelines, and MCP integration, as primary citizens rather than bolted-on extensions. Data models, event streams, and APIs should be designed from the start to support intelligent data triage, automated early warning, actionable recommendations, and resilient data pipelines.
Hands-On Technical Leadership: You will be deeply involved in building the platform alongside the engineering team, prototyping critical paths, writing code where it matters most, leading rigorous design and code reviews, and mentoring engineers through pairing and example. Approximately half your time will be hands-on; the other half on architecture, design, and strategic alignment.
Strategic Partnership: Partner closely with the Director of R&D Software, and with Product Management to translate business requirements into a market-leading real-time SaaS application.
Bridge Present and Future: Optimize and enhance the existing codebase where it matters, while establishing a clear migration path to the next-generation architecture. Break complex architectural transformations into achievable milestones with credible estimates and schedules.