Staff Software Engineer, Essentials (Calgary)

Syndio

15h • $180,000 - $200,000 • Remote

About The Position

Syndio is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for its Essentials product, which handles critical pay equity analyses. This role focuses on optimizing the performance, scalability, and trustworthiness of complex statistical computations on large datasets. The engineer will work on data ingestion, validation, modeling, and reporting workflows, ensuring they can handle increasing data volumes efficiently and reliably. A significant part of the role involves developing AI agents to automate and execute these workflows, requiring the creation of robust tooling, guardrails, and evaluation mechanisms to ensure agent output is dependable. This is a Staff-level position, one level below Principal, with expectations for significant impact on the product's capabilities and the team's practices.

Requirements

• Staff-level engineer with 8+ years of professional hands-on experience.
• High-output individual contributor who raises the output of those around them.
• Deep experience in complex, distributed, service-based systems, comfortable reasoning about failure modes, data consistency, and latency across service boundaries.
• Proven performance and scale work experience: profiling, bottleneck identification, and fixing without breaking correctness.
• Experience with large-dataset computation, numerical or statistical workloads, or heavy data pipelines.
• Orchestration experience: building workflows on message systems, queues, or workflow orchestration tooling.
• Strong proficiency in several of Python, Go, Node/JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Postgres, and NoSQL stores (e.g., Firebase).
• Familiarity with caching layers like Redis and their tradeoffs.
• Strong end-to-end and integration testing skills for service-based architectures.
• Hands-on experience with an e2e framework (e.g., Playwright, Cypress).
• Strong agentic development practice: daily use of coding agents, tuning agent usage, and building reliable harnesses.
• High autonomy: ability to drive ambiguous, high-stakes problems to shipped results independently.
• Cross-team collaboration skills, including working with non-technical leaders and translating technical constraints into business language.
• Experience partnering with technical leaders to establish and follow team standards.
• Based in Calgary and legally authorized to work in Alberta without future visa support.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on experience building with AI systems (LLM applications, agent frameworks, retrieval, evaluation harnesses, model-backed pipelines in production).
• Background in statistics, data science, or quantitative analysis, particularly regression modeling.
• Experience in a domain where correctness is non-negotiable and errors have significant consequences.
• Experience working in and making large, complex codebases more navigable.

Responsibilities

• Build and optimize high-performance data workflows for complex mathematical and statistical calculations on large datasets.
• Design workflows to scale to significantly larger data volumes without requiring a complete rewrite.
• Own end-to-end performance optimization, including query plans, indexing, batching, parallelism, memory management, and caching.
• Ensure the correctness and verifiability of performance work, as results have significant consequences for customers.
• Work with technologies for dependable large workflows, including message/queueing systems, orchestration, scheduling, retries, idempotency, and backpressure.
• Design for partial failure in long-running, multi-stage pipelines.
• Build observability tools for diagnosing slow or incorrect runs, including timing, lineage, and intermediate state inspection.
• Build tooling for AI agents to execute Essentials workflows, including data validation, remediation, analysis setup, exception triage, and report generation.
• Design harnesses to ensure agent output is trustworthy in a high-stakes domain, incorporating evaluation sets, verification steps, constrained tool surfaces, and human review points.
• Provide agents with necessary context, such as documentation, schemas, conventions, and project state.
• Sharpen personal agentic development workflows and establish team best practices.
• Partner with Engineering Manager and technical leaders to set and uphold standards for testing, performance, and agentic practice.
• Improve integration and end-to-end testing for a complex service-based architecture.
• Mentor team members through design reviews, pairing, and code reviews.

Benefits

• Competitive Compensation: $180,000 - $200,000 CAD per year
• Syndio Equity
• 20 days annually for recharging, plus paid sick & safe time, compassion leave, and voting leave
• Additional Private Medical coverage

What This Job Offers

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