Staff Platform Engineer

Acquird.io•Toronto, ON

9d•CA$200,000 - CA$250,000•Remote

About The Position

We're building an AI-native platform that helps marketing and creative teams at top e-commerce brands understand which ads are working and ship more winning creative across the major ad platforms. We're a Series B remote-first team. We've been growing 2.5x year over year, led by second-time founders (currently just under 100 headcount). AI isn't a feature here: it's the foundation of our product and of how we build. This role sits on our platform team: designing, building, and maintaining the backend APIs and services the rest of engineering builds on, as our AI workflow platform scales to many times its current surface. Sample projects include building a unified API for our insights data and storing metrics from our data providers at scale. The stack is Node.js, TypeScript, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB, with React on the frontend. We're remote by default with real in-person time: product, engineering, and design get together for a focused build week every couple of months, plus a summer retreat.

Requirements

Lead/Staff level Backend Engineer with most of career spent at fast-scaling startups, taking products from zero to one with high ownership.
Pragmatic and quick, optimizing for shipped customer value over polish.
Energized by shifting priorities and creating clarity.
Experience architecting backend systems that other teams build on, owning service boundaries, data models, and API contracts in production (Node.js and TypeScript; similar stacks transfer well).
Experience leading complex, multi-engineer backend projects from design through production, and being the technical decision-maker.
AI-native development habits: directing AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar) and rigorously reviewing/owning output.
Experience designing asynchronous, event-driven systems (queues, background jobs, messaging) under real production load.
Experience owning third-party integrations end to end, including auth, rate limits, retries, and failure modes.
Experience simplifying data architecture at scale: schema design, ETL pipelines, and storage choices.
6+ years building and maintaining large-scale software applications, with recent years operating at a Staff or Lead IC level.
Track record of taking products from 0 to 1, ideally at Series A to C startups.
Comfort with a fast pace: short project cycles, evolving requirements, high ownership.
Exceptional written and verbal communication, including translating technical issues into business impact.
Experience building or integrating LLM-powered product features or agent systems.
Able to work with significant overlap to Eastern Time.

Nice To Haves

Founder or founding-engineer experience.
Experience with Azure or another public cloud platform.
Experience in adtech, martech, or marketing/creative analytics.
Experience with ad-platform APIs like Meta's.

Responsibilities

Designing, building, and maintaining the backend APIs and services the rest of engineering builds on, as our AI workflow platform scales to many times its current surface.
Building a unified API for our insights data.
Storing metrics from our data providers at scale.
Architecting backend systems that other teams build on, owning the service boundaries, data models, and API contracts in production.
Leading complex, multi-engineer backend projects from design through production, and being the technical decision-maker when trade-offs were contested.
Designing asynchronous, event-driven systems (queues, background jobs, messaging) that run under real production load.
Owning hard third-party integrations end to end, including auth, rate limits, retries, and failure modes.
Simplifying data architecture at scale: schema design, ETL pipelines, and storage choices that held up as data volume grew.
Setting technical direction.
Raising an engineering team's bar through design reviews, mentoring, and establishing standards other engineers adopt.