Staff Software Engineer, Builders

EvenUp•Toronto, ON

4d•$212,500 - $287,500

About The Position

As a Staff Engineer on our Builders team, you will be the technical anchor for a team handling EvenUp's highest-priority customer issues, reporting directly to the CPO's organization. Your role will involve leading complex investigations, driving architectural improvements to prevent recurring problems, and acting as a technical liaison between the Builders team and the rest of engineering. This position focuses on long-term solutions rather than immediate fixes, aiming to reduce the need for reactive problem-solving over time. You will establish the technical direction for how EvenUp manages escalations at scale, including tooling, patterns, and standards. The team operates without a dedicated Product Manager, emphasizing the need for engineers who think like product owners. As the most senior individual contributor, you will set the standard for this by deeply understanding customer needs, making informed decisions about development priorities, and influencing the product roadmap based on insights from escalations.

Requirements

8+ years of software engineering experience, with a demonstrated track record at the Staff level or equivalent
Exceptional diagnostic and systems-thinking skills — you can hold the complexity of a multi-service architecture in your head and find the failure point others miss
Deep technical credibility: you can write and review code, design systems, and make sound architectural trade-offs under time pressure
Experience driving improvements across team boundaries — you influence without authority and get other teams to own their part of the fix
Strong communication skills with engineers, product leaders, and non-technical stakeholders
A bias toward permanent fixes over repeated patches — you've built things that made whole categories of problems go away
Deeply product-minded: you understand the "why" behind customer pain, not just the "what," and you're as comfortable making product decisions as you are architectural ones
Experience at a high-growth SaaS company navigating rapid product evolution

Nice To Haves

Experience building or leading reliability engineering, SRE, or platform functions at a growing company
Deep familiarity with AI/ML product systems and the failure modes they introduce (data quality, model drift, pipeline failures, etc.)
Experience working in regulated industries or with enterprise customers who have high SLA expectations
Prior background in incident command or escalation management frameworks

Responsibilities

Lead technical resolution of the most complex, multi-system escalations — the ones that require deep cross-functional understanding and careful architectural thinking
Identify systemic weaknesses across the product that generate escalations and partner with other engineering teams to address them at the root
Define and drive the technical strategy for the squad: observability, tooling, runbooks, incident response patterns, and reliability standards
Partner closely with the CPO and EM to shape the squad's roadmap, balancing urgent reactive work with high-leverage proactive investments
Serve as a technical advisor and force multiplier for other engineers on the squad — reviewing approaches, accelerating investigations, and raising the ceiling on what the team can handle
Influence engineering culture and practices across EvenUp: blameless post-mortems, on-call hygiene, failure mode documentation
Act as a product thinker for the squad — synthesizing patterns from escalations into product insights, shaping what the team builds proactively, and making sound scope decisions without PM support
Engage directly with key customers or CS leadership when escalations require deep technical credibility at the table