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Senior Backend Developer (Distributed Systems)

Job summary
Permanent contract
Toronto
Salary: Not specified
Experience: > 5 years
Skills & expertise
Collaboration and teamwork
Problem-solving skills
gRPC
Kubernetes
Git
+11

Movable Ink
Movable Ink

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The position

Job description

  • The AI Systems team owns the core recommendations engine that powers billions of AI-driven marketing decisions daily across some of the world’s largest consumer brands
  • As a Senior Backend Developer, you will lead the evolution of this system into a modern, scalable distributed architecture - one of the most impactful technical initiatives at Movable Ink
  • This is an opportunity to do deep distributed systems work on a production system that directly drives revenue for our customers, while shaping the technical direction of a team working at the intersection of systems engineering and machine learning
  • Lead the architectural evolution of the core recommendations pipeline to a modern distributed architecture, delivering incremental value while maintaining production stability
  • Design, build, and operate scalable, fault-tolerant backend services that power personalization at scale across content selection, send-time optimization, subject line personalization, and frequency capping
  • Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, reliability risks, and scaling limitations across the system
  • Collaborate with ML engineers and product stakeholders to translate requirements into rigorous technical designs with a clear path to production
  • Own key system components end-to-end - from architecture and implementation to deployment, monitoring, and incident response
  • Champion engineering best practices around system design, code quality, testing, observability, and operational excellence
  • Mentor engineers and contribute to a culture of technical rigor, ownership, and continuous improvement

Benefits

  • Generous PTO
  • Global Mental Health and Well-Being Benefits
  • 401K Contribution
  • Employee Resource Groups
  • Volunteer Opportunities
  • Social Events and Activities
  • Flexible Work Opportunities
  • Comprehensive Health Benefits
  • Parental Leave and Support

Preferred experience

  • Experience with modern distributed and microservice technologies (we use Kubernetes, Kafka, and gRPC)
  • Strong foundation in Python
  • Strong technical leadership skills with the ability to collaborate effectively, advocate for sound architectural decisions, and mentor other engineers
  • Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems that are fault tolerant, highly available, and highly concurrent
  • Practical understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: consensus, partitioning, replication, back-pressure, idempotency, and failure handling
  • Experience with distributed data processing frameworks (e.g. Apache Spark, Apache Flink, Apache Beam); hands-on Spark experience is a plus
  • Exceptional problem-solving skills, including the ability to efficiently identify, analyze, and resolve complex issues in production systems
  • Exemplary software engineering skills (system design, unit testing, git, code review, CI/CD)
  • Familiar with Software Development Lifecycle practices, such as continuous integration/continuous delivery and automated deployment (we use Docker, Kubernetes, and GitHub Actions)
  • 5+ years software engineering experience with a focus on distributed systems
  • Experience with a cloud provider e.g. AWS, Azure, GCP (we use Google Cloud Platform)
  • A willingness and eagerness to continuously learn, adapt to evolving technologies, and strive for personal and professional improvement