Staff Software Architect

Kano

23h•Remote

About The Position

We’re looking for a hands-on architect who designs systems AND builds them. You’ll spend roughly 60% of your time in the codebase—writing code, reviewing pull requests, prototyping solutions—and 40% setting architectural direction, mentoring senior engineers, and driving engineering standards. This role is for someone who loves going deep on hard technical problems. You’ll be the most senior technical IC in the studio, reporting to the President. There is no large platform team beneath you—you’ll have engineering partners, but the expectation is that you personally do the deep technical work, not just point at it. The company is a remote-first workplace with an in-person attendance requirement 2-6 times a year.

Requirements

10+ years in software engineering, with at least 3 years as a staff/principal-level IC who stayed hands-on
Recent, demonstrable production coding—you can point to systems you personally designed AND built in the last 2 years
Deep experience with high-availability, high-throughput consumer-facing systems
Strong AWS background (IAM, VPC, ECS/Fargate, S3, KMS, and security tooling like GuardDuty, Security Hub, CloudTrail)
Infrastructure-as-code proficiency (Terraform or CDK) and CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions or equivalent)
Experience owning security and privacy posture in a platform-reviewed environment
SRE fundamentals: SLOs, incident management, load testing, graceful degradation
Data architecture across relational and non-relational systems
Observability stack experience (e.g., Graylog, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, Sentry)
Production experience using AI to accelerate development and operations
Clear communicator who can influence across product, engineering, legal, and finance without positional authority
Proven experience integrating AI/ML into production environments (e.g., working with OpenAI API, LangChain, or vector databases).
Must be legally eligible to work in Canada.
Only applicants living in British Columbia will be considered for the role.

Nice To Haves

Unity, HTML5/JavaScript, and/or PHP game platform experience
MongoDB and/or MySQL in production at scale
Prior FinOps responsibility and vendor negotiations
Experience running SR&ED or similar R&D incentive programs
Background in gaming, live-service products, or other high-engagement consumer apps

Responsibilities

Design and build backend systems, services, and APIs that support our live games at scale.
Own system architecture decisions—data modeling, service boundaries, caching strategies, async processing—and implement the critical paths yourself.
Drive code quality through hands-on code review, pairing with senior engineers, and establishing patterns that the team adopts because they’re clearly better.
Improve application performance: profile bottlenecks, optimize queries, reduce latency.
Lead the integration of LLMs and Generative AI into our game loops and internal tooling. Build the scaffolding for AI-driven features (e.g., dynamic content, automated moderation, or player support agents).
Build and improve observability—structured logging, metrics, traces, error monitoring—so the team can debug fast and ship with confidence.
Leverage AI tools (code assist, test generation, automated triage) to accelerate your own work and set the example for the team.
Set and evolve engineering standards: CI/CD pipelines, branching strategy, quality gates, dependency management, and security controls.
Mentor Tech Leads and senior engineers through design reviews, architecture discussions, and direct feedback on their work.
Act as the studio’s technical conscience on security and privacy—staying ahead of platform requirements, driving improvements pragmatically, and being the accountable point person.
Define SLOs, error budgets, and on-call expectations. Lead incident response when things break and drive post-incident reviews that result in durable fixes.
Partner with Product, Finance, and Legal to keep technical plans aligned with business goals. Translate engineering trade-offs into business language.
Own the SR&ED engineering process—eligibility gates in Jira, contemporaneous notes, artifact capture—partnering with Finance on claims.
Champion FinOps: monitor cloud spend, right-size infrastructure, and report on cost vs. performance.
Define the studio’s roadmap for AI adoption. Evaluate third-party AI vendors vs. self-hosted models, balancing cost, privacy, and performance.

Benefits

Competitive wages determined by market research
Uncapped profit share program
Health, dental and vision benefits
3 weeks vacation to start
Paid holiday shutdown in December
12 paid Care Days per year
Yearly Continuous Improvement allowance
A results-driven company with a compassionate culture
Opportunity to work on game projects that are enjoyed by millions of players worldwide!
Ability to make a difference. Have an idea? Talk directly with leadership about it instead of running through layers of bureaucracy