Own technical direction and architecture evolution of a live, revenue-generating platform

Scale throughput and reliability while customers onboard, including zero-downtime changes to running systems

Harden the platform: tenant isolation, rate limiting, security, data integrity

Establish observability, SLOs, and incident practices as the customer base grows

Lead performance and capacity work ahead of demand, not behind it

Raise engineering standards through design reviews and mentorship

Partner with Product to balance platform investment against feature delivery

Identify and retire scaling risks and technical debt before they compound

Requirements

10+ years building and operating cloud-native backend or platform systems

Owned the scaling of a production SaaS or data platform through rapid customer growth: hardening, re-architecture under load, and maturing an early product to enterprise grade

Deep hands-on experience with high-throughput distributed systems: event streaming or message queues, async processing, idempotency, retries, backpressure

Strong performance engineering: profiling, load testing, horizontal scaling, capacity planning

Production reliability ownership: observability, SLOs, incident management, fault-tolerant design

Multi-tenant SaaS experience, including tenant isolation and noisy-neighbor problems

Proficiency in Python and JavaScript/TypeScript (Next.js)

Hands-on daily coder with founder-level ownership; comfortable in low-process, high-ambiguity environments

Built or scaled an integration platform,



ETL/data pipeline product, or API platform (connectors, transformation pipelines, webhooks) (Nice to Have)

Kafka or similar streaming infrastructure at scale (Nice to Have)

Supply chain or logistics systems exposure (WMS, OMS, TMS, EDI integrations) (Nice to Have)

AI-assisted engineering workflows; AI is deeply embedded in how we build (Nice to Have)

Experience shipping AI/LLM-driven capabilities in production (rag, generation pipeline, agentic workflows) (Nice to Have)

Core Competencies Demonstrates expertise in scaling cloud-native backend systems, ensuring production reliability, and implementing performance engineering practices. Proficient in Python and JavaScript/TypeScript, with a solid focus on multi-tenant SaaS architecture and observability.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Cloud-Native Backend Systems

Performance Engineering

Production Reliability Ownership

Multi-Tenant SaaS Experience

High-Throughput Distributed Systems

ATS Optimization Keywords Hard Skills

Python

JavaScript

TypeScript

Event Streaming

Message Queues

Async Processing

Load Testing

Capacity Planning

Fault-Tolerant Design

Tenant Isolation

Soft Skills

Mentorship

Leadership

Collaboration

Industry Keywords

SaaS

Data Platform

Observability

Incident Management

Scaling Risks

Technical Debt

Tools & Technologies

Kafka

ETL

API Platforms

Integration Platforms

AI/LLM-Driven Capabilities

#J-18808-Ljbffr

📌 Principal Engineer (Toronto)
🏢 Jobtailor
📍 Toronto