Staff Software Engineer

Ground News•Kitchener, ON

3d•Remote

About The Position

As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll play a pivotal role in keeping the systems behind Ground News fast, reliable, and ready to scale for millions of readers. You’ll sit within our backend chapter and work out of the Platform & Infrastructure pod, splitting your time across enabling backend feature development and the SRE-style work that keeps our services healthy in production. Reporting to the Head of Engineering, you will work closely with the engineering team to design, build, and operate the services that empower our users to see every side of the story. This is a hands-on role where you’ll bring fresh ideas to a fast-growing consumer platform, balancing technical excellence with operational rigor. From designing and shipping backend services to improving observability, reliability, and incident response, your work will directly impact how dependably people engage with the world’s news. You’ll also be a key liaison between Customer Success and the broader product and engineering teams, translating user-facing issues into technical action and closing the loop back to the people who hear from our readers every day. As a senior voice in code review, you’ll help raise the bar and expedite the PR process across backend and infrastructure, while also supporting the frontend wherever you can, and you’ll bring that same perspective to our architecture and systems discussions.

Requirements

15+ years of experience maintaining and operating high-performing, production backend systems.
Deep expertise in Node.js and TypeScript.
Strong experience designing, building, and integrating RESTful APIs and the services behind them.
Solid knowledge of distributed systems design and architecture patterns, with the ability to make and communicate sound architectural decisions at scale.
Hands-on experience operating services in the cloud (AWS and/or GCP), including containerized workloads with Kubernetes and infrastructure as code with Terraform.
SRE-oriented experience: monitoring, alerting, incident response, and performance optimization for production systems.
Experience with data stores and event-driven systems such as PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and message queues or streams (Kafka, SQS, or Pub/Sub).
A track record of shipping and scaling reliable services for a successful consumer product.
Experience planning and executing rollouts safely, including monitoring stability and mitigating risk.
A collaborative approach to code review and cross-functional work, comfortable acting as a senior voice and partnering with non-engineering teams like Customer Success.

Responsibilities

Take on SRE-shaped responsibilities such as monitoring, alerting, incident response, and performance tuning to keep our services reliable and scalable in production.
Manage infrastructure as code and deployment workflows across AWS and GCP, using Kubernetes and OpenTofu (Terraform) to ship changes safely.
Act as a senior voice in code review, expediting the PR process primarily across backend and infrastructure while also supporting the frontend where possible.
Partner with Customer Success to triage, prioritize, and resolve user-impacting issues, and relay that context back to the broader product and engineering teams.
Contribute a senior voice to architecture and systems design discussions, helping steer technical decisions in the right direction.
Champion high engineering quality through testing, code reviews, observability, and thoughtful operational practices.
Own the services you build, monitoring system health and responding to incidents with urgency.